Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

October 06, 2009

Interactive Intelligence Offers Business Continuity Insights, Outlines Measures

By Brendan B. Read

Senior Contributing Editor

Communications is the linchpin in business continuity/disaster recovery, or “BC/DR.” Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) has long been a leading-edge supplier of business communications equipment. Here is an exchange that TMCnet had recently with Tom Fisher, Interactive Intelligence’s director of Systems Engineering, on this vital topic.

TMC (News - Alert): Discuss the benefits and downsides of each deployment method of key routing and business (i.e. contact handling, CRM) technologies: on-premises or off-premises hosting in planning for, surviving, and recovering from disasters.

Tom Fisher: Disaster recovery for core technology solution components can come in multiple flavors. Customers can create their own internal DR solution through the use of geographically dispersed data centers, or have hosting done for them by a technology provider. The decision lies in their willingness and/or security requirements for a third party to gain access to their core back-end systems for providing [the likes of] IVR and screen-pop. While each customer should decide which architecture and option is best for them, the key is selecting a solution that will give them as many options as possible.

In an “on-premise” disaster recovery model, customers will typically have two or more data centers located across a geographic distance. Each of these data centers is then designed to be able to handle the full capacity of contacts such as incoming calls, Web chats, and e-mail. When deployed properly, this provides a completely self-contained DR model that allows for recovery at all levels of a disaster -- from an individual component failure, to a full-scale data center loss. Historically, this model was out of reach of most customers due to the cost of backing up every proprietary piece of communications equipment. With the adoption of software-based, consolidated communications technologies over the past few years, however, this is no longer a barrier to deployment.

In an “off-premise” disaster recovery model, customers use a hosted vendor to ensure they can still route interactions and handle customer inquiries no matter the state of their on-premise capabilities. Using the Internet or PSTN-based connections, customer calls can be routed to the hosted DR data center, which then get routed to agents at any location. This option is typically selected by customers looking to eliminate capital expenditure for DR, while ensuring that they have a reliable recovery plan in place.

Whichever option is chosen, the days of not deploying a real-time DR solution are over. While this was historically a “nice-to-have,” disaster recovery solutions today are a mandatory requirement that entail much planning and testing.

TMC: Discuss the benefits and downsides of VoIP via the Internet, carrier-provided PSTN, and wireless in staying connected with customers and employees in disaster planning, survivability, and recovery.

TF: Residential high-speed Internet access via wireless or wired services has opened up many options to customers for the use of at-home workers, particularly for disaster recovery purposes. The benefit is that agents can be sent home to a secure off-site location or even to a hotel, while still having access to a full communications suite to process customer interactions. This flexibility was unheard of just a few short years ago. While this capability is a real win for customers, the downside with Internet connectivity is still lack of QoS [Quality of Service]. The result can be bad audio quality for the caller since download speeds are almost always higher than upload. Despite this limitation, Internet-based IP telephony is a real advantage for DR.

TMC: What steps has your firm taken to enable its hardware and software to protect against and withstand disasters (i.e. computer viruses, voltage spikes, fires, impacts, thefts)?

TF: VoIP alone provides robust support of disaster recovery in the sense that a call can take multiple routes to get to its destination in the event of a component failure. What Interactive Intelligence has accomplished through its “all-in-one,” single-platform communications architecture is to extend the benefits of VoIP for disaster recovery into the applications layer.

This makes the Interactive Intelligence solution fully redundant at all levels, with each element being deployed in an N+1 configuration without associated geographic limitations. In addition, by consolidating applications onto a single platform, customers can create one DR strategy for their entire communications solution rather than having to create a separate one for [each element] such as the PBX (News - Alert), ACD, IVR, and voicemail. This gives customers the ability to create a fully fault-tolerant and redundant architecture across geographies to account for failures at the component, application and physical site-level. For example, many of our larger customers deploy our solution at two data centers which are geographically separated.

Attached to each of these data centers are all the offices receiving the features and functions of the Interactive Intelligence solution. Each of these data centers are configured in such a way that any or all elements at either site can fail without impacting the customer. While this is possible with hardware-centric solutions, what makes the Interactive Intelligence architecture so unique is its use of standards-based IT infrastructure and even virtual technology rather than proprietary hardware. This use of standard IT infrastructure combined with the “all-in-one,” consolidated communications application architecture, finally gives customers a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy at an affordable price.

Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Kelly McGuire

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