Interview of Augustin De Sousa, IT SDM Global at Concentrix, at the All4Customer 2024 Event

 

Amin:

My name is Amin, I am the commercial director of the company. Wisper is a software publisher. 

We have developed an agent position management solution. Concretely, it is the management of the environment that is made available to agents: its operating system, its applications. 

The technology behind it is desktop virtualization. 

And our job is to support customer relationship actors, both internal centers and BPOs, in the deployment of the operating system made available to agents, the security patches deployed by IT teams, the applications deployed for agents' operations, and the application updates as well. 

Augustin, I suggest you introduce yourself, tell us a little more about yourself and your role in Concentrix.

Augustin:

Hello everyone. I’m Augustin de Sousa, IT Director SDM Global at Concentrix. 

I manage an IT team that is responsible for delivering IT services for our customers. 

I’ve been in IT for more than 30 years, 18 years in the company, or in companies, I should say, since in 18 years, there has been a consolidation of the market. 

 

Today, there are just over 400,000 people in the world, in 500 sites, 70 countries. We deliver in more than 95% of the languages that exist in the world, for just over 2,000 customers worldwide.

 

Amin: Can you tell us a little more about the IT organization at Concentrix?

Augustin: 

The organization, as in any international or global group, is distributed throughout the world. We have all the IT departments that are represented, from network to security to servers and workstation management. 

We have the specificity to do everything internally. So, all IT services are internalized with us, and we control our solutions and infrastructure from end to end.

 

Amin: What are the main challenges you face?

 

Augustin:

The main challenges are related to the context of strong growth in which we are today.

So both growth, because we have new customers or existing customers who grow with us, who grow with us. We also have an internal activity within the group, since we combined with Webhelp, 6 months of that. 

The challenge is to be able to deliver IT services that are robust, secure, flexible, and all that quickly. 

Since our customers ask us to be able to deploy solutions as quickly as possible, to be able to climb on peaks of activity with schedules that are often short. 

 

Amin:

It makes us a good transition to talk about Wisper. 

My first question for you would be to explain your journey with us.

How did you find out about our solution?

 

Augustin:

So I met Wisper in a corner of an event like this one, a little over 10 years ago. 

It wasn’t called Wisper at the time, it was called Neocoretech. 

In 2013, we made our first POC with Neocoretech at the time. 

The solution was not yet that of today: namely that there were still server infrastructures to run VMs, which is no longer the case today. 

Today it turns on the workstation, which is really the differential factor of Wisper. 

Over the past 10 years, the solution has been evaluated. We did not prosecute because there was server infrastructure, etc., at the time, it did not match what we wanted. 

I kept in touch, I continued to follow the evolution of the product and the company. 

And there you have it, we went through the previous version that was tied to hardware, Intel NUCs that we also tested. And today, we have made it, as the solution runs on existing hardware, on any PC model. 

So, we were able to start again via a POC, a little over a year ago, and today, we have Wisper positions in production at home.

 

Amin:

Very well, this allows me to say a few words about our positioning. Indeed, we position ourselves as an alternative to VDI & Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solutions, which you are surely familiar with. Our major differentiator is that our solution does not require any server infrastructure to run virtual machines. 

 

In this context, Augustin, what are the issues addressed by our solution Wisper 360 ?

 

Augustin:

So, the first problem we wanted to address, because we are also a user of cloud solutions, I will not mention the big names in the market. 

We use them all, too. 

On a fait face à quelques incidents où, quand on a toutes les VM qui tournent sur un environnement serveur, quand l’environnement serveur n’est pas disponible ou n’est plus joignable pour un problème de DNS, par exemple, on plante des centaines, voire des milliers de postes qui n’ont plus accès à leur VM. 

That’s the first point we wanted to make, to add resilience. 

Wisper was the right solution, since the VM runs locally on the workstation. 

There is no central infrastructure that can fall and impact all stations. If there is a failure, it happens at the station level. Resilience is at the workplace level as well, so the failover is automatic on the workstation, without going through servers or anything else. 

Obviously, there is a server for authentication, but if that server falls, it does not prevent VMs from working.

 

Amin: Very clear. What were the decisive factors in choosing Wisper 360 ?

 

Augustin:

 

Well, the one I mentioned was the main factor. 

After that, we must add all the other advantages, namely security, since the VM is totally isolated and controlled in the plant. 

La VM tourne sur le poste de travail, mais est gérée en central, donc on gère les images Master de façon centralisée comme sur un VDI Cloud, sauf que les images sont ensuite downloadé sur les machines. 

We have the flexibility, that is to say that we are able to change the version and especially to go back quickly if it goes wrong, or if we did something that we did not see during the test part. We can go back very quickly. 

 

Flexibility. The operation strictly identical whether you are teleworking or on site. We don’t have to build a second infrastructure dedicated to work at home, for example. The same infrastructure is used for the site and telework. 

 

Amin:

Today, the solution is in production on a thousand agents. We continue to develop with you.

What is the impact of using Wisper 360 In production? What is the true ROI of the solution?

 

Augustin:

The real ROI is user simplification. 

When you were previously working from home with a VPN or even the Cloud, the user had to authenticate several times to arrive on his application. 

With Wisper, we are fully integrated. So, we authenticate only once and we have access to the VM locally. From an IT point of view, it is guaranteed that at the moment T, all workstations have the same software version on their VM. 

We are no longer deploying software with a software distribution tool where we must troubleshoot one by one machines when on the deployment report there are machines that have not taken the updates. 

With Wisper, once the version is pushed, we know it has arrived. We know that all the machines are up to date. 

Backtracking is very simple. With a simple click, you can go back to the previous version if necessary. 

We also started a test on training rooms, since Wisper will allow us to automate the use of a training room where we must train, for example, two different customers on the same day.

Today, PCs must be completely re-imaged by hand to switch between clients. The network must be reconfigured. 

With Wisper, we can automate all of this. We can have the first client's VM started at 8 a.m. for the training, and at 3 p.m., when we are going to conduct the second training, we can automatically launch the new VM for the second client in the training room, which will automatically switch to the second network. 

So, it remains totally waterproof, totally secure and automated with this principle of scheduling start and stop VM.

 

Amin: Very good. If we talk about project, where are we in the deployment of Wisper 360 at Concentrix ?

 

Augustin:

We are approaching 1000 positions in production, mainly on the platform EMEA. What I explained, so production, training. 

We have other POCs, so proof of concepts that are in progress. 

We are very careful when we test a solution. We want to be sure that it works well and in the context of the client. 

So, we have an ongoing POC on the Asia-Pacific plate, we will deploy to the United States in a few weeks. To continue to deploy the solution, I would say gently, but surely, with use cases that are different or varied compared to customers.

 

Amin:

All right. Wisper is its product, and it’s also made up of women and men.

What do you think of the quality of service? How would you rate the support of the Wisper teams in your deployment project?

 

Augustin:

So, in the 10 years that we’ve known each other, that we’ve followed Wisper, we now have a level of partnership that I’ll call it. 

The teams are always there. 

Every time we’ve had a few bugs, we’ve had solutions delivered in 48 hours maximum. And we’re really in a partnership mode, that is to say that we are also heard when we ask for new features. And that was the case.

 We’ve had a lot of requests. 

I hope we also helped to develop the product. Each time, we took into account, discussions, I would say real partnerships, where we saw the version evolve and then the new features arrived as and when. 

I had the privilege of seeing the new version 2 that will be released at the end of April with features we were looking forward to.

 

Amin: I take this opportunity to ask you the question, what did you think of this demo we made today at noon?

 

Augustin:

I was not disappointed. I saw the features we were expecting, particularly the one that will address, I would say, the remaining weak points of Wisper: the VMs run locally, and files need to be downloaded to the PCs, so it can take a bit of time, even though the updates are incremental. 

Now, we will have the ability to keep multiple versions on the local disk. This will also help us in terms of user convenience when pushing new versions, allowing us to test and roll back instantly by stopping the VM at certain points, without having todownload the delta every time. 

So, I can’t wait to test it in a few weeks.