Hi Mr Babar Kalim and other interested in per-seat costs,
For calculating costs per seat following variables should be taken into account.
(1) HW/SW Platform (Technology Selection)
(2) Carrier costs (Bandwidth)
(3) US side telco charges and LD
(4) Recurring expenses like leases on space
(5) HR expenses
All these costs are highly variable. For example if you are talking about HW platform then you can either bring the infrastructure inhouse for deployment like the ACD, Dialer and telphony servers/routers etc or you can remotely tap into a data center in US/UK. This is usually offered through ASPs. ASPs are good to get you off the ground but there per-seat expense over a period of time will mount to a point that after this bringing the solution in-house will be more cost effective. With a hosted solution there will be some sort of up-front of costs involved and some minimal HW costs as well deployed on the client side. Then there will be per-seat per-month charges as well. If you are serious I can suggest you some names that I ahve used or seen their demos.
Carrier costs are variable based on the telco or provider. For instance I talked about singtel before …they are cheaper then lets say BT or FLAG. The difference is in quality though.
US telco charges vary according to the telco and state, cost of 1-800 number is pretty much fixed. MCI , AT&T and Qwest are the usual choices. Costs per min are between 2.50 to 3.50 cents depending on you plans.
In one of the postings I noticed someone mentioning Telephony At Work architecture. Well we are running Telephony at Work as well and in fact we were the first one to go live using this platform. I hope this info helps …let me know if you need more.
Good to see interest in investment in Pakistan…and surely if indians can make it why can’t we.
Ciao.