Carlos Rafael Alayo Velásquez, CIO, Konecta Peru, explains how the Peruvian BPO provider overcame the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic by improving productivity, efficiency and customer service.
Konecta Group is a large regional company dedicated to BPO services and operates 90 centers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Morocco, Mexico, Peru, Portugal and the US. Its contact centers serve more than 300 clients and employ 70,000 people worldwide.
For its part, Konecta Peru is one of the largest providers of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and full-service contact center services in the country, with a market share of 23.4% and 14,000 employees.
Its service offerings include providing phone communication, email management, FAQ websites, social media, live web chats, mobile apps, surveys and data management for its clients.
Challenge
Since 2011, Peru has become one of the main markets for Konecta, where the company provides services to a significant number of clients throughout the region. The recent acquisition of the Rockethall group of companies will further expand the Konecta Peru customer base and workforce and increase the need for flexible IT solutions.
Carlos Rafael Alayo Velásquez, CIO, Konecta Peru, said: “Our goal is to expand our market share to 25% and continue to strengthen our position as the leading BPO service provider in Peru. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, we achieved significant business growth last year, hiring 9,000 new employees.”
To serve a growing customer base, Konecta Peru must be able to allocate human and IT resources dynamically, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When the government declared a health emergency, confinement measures were imposed and citizens had to stay home,” said Alayo.
“To meet service commitments, we had to provide thousands of employees with secure access to customer systems from home, so they could work remotely with all the right tools and meet the same data security standards as in the office. For this, we decided to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure [VDI] solution for secure remote access and rapid deployment for agents.”
Why Lenovo Truescale?
To support the new VDI solution, Konecta Peru looked for a flexible, easily scalable and low-maintenance infrastructure platform.
“Due to complex connectivity requirements and security concerns, the public cloud was not an option. However, the cloud model appealed to us, especially as we wanted a platform that could scale dynamically without all the hassle of acquiring, installing and maintaining the physical infrastructure ourselves,” said Alayo.
After a thorough evaluation, Konecta Peru decided that Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Services was the ideal choice for its business. It is a subscription-based agreement that gives the option to use and pay for data center hardware and services, on-site or at another preferred location, without having to purchase the equipment.
Regarding the selection model, Alayo said: “Due to the changing BPO model where growth and shrinkage are fast and because it was not possible to bring 100% of our platform to the cloud, Konecta decided to search for a better hybrid model.”
Lenovo TruScale works very well between having things on-prem and in the cloud because it meets the main objectives of elasticity and can grow and decrease without the need to buy new equipment, consolidating a new billing concept.
“We considered many infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, including HPE GreenLake cloud services,” said Alayo.
“Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Services were highly recommended by our partner Blue Ocean Technologies, whom we trust because we have worked together for many years. We were very impressed with the flexibility, transparency, agility and reduced financial risk that Lenovo TruScale offered and how quickly the Lenovo team jumped into action.”
With Lenovo TruScale offering out-of-band monitoring and metering through the Lenovo XClarity Controller, built into each server on a separate microprocessor, the data center infrastructure can be monitored without putting any load on it.
The resource utilization model is based on CPU utilization per node, which means Lenovo TruScale customers are charged based on the workloads they process.
“The collaboration between our internal IT team, Blue Ocean Technologies and Lenovo was fantastic. Everyone came together to install the infrastructure and the new VDI environment was up and running in just 30 days,” said Alayo.
There was also no need to replace or upgrade equipment. “In this case, we did not have to do much more than we were already doing because we used Lenovo TruScale to implement the Konecta Cloud VDI solution in Peru in its hybrid model,” he said.
Results
Lenovo TruScale infrastructure services meet Konecta Peru’s availability, scalability and security requirements while keeping operating costs transparent and minimizing risk.
“With Lenovo TruScale, we can scale resources one week and scale back the next, paying only for what we use,” said the CIO. “This allows us to quickly respond to changing business requirements as we continue to grow. Crucially, we run workloads in our own data center so we can ensure compliance with data protection and security standards.”
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