Whilst considering the design requirements of a hosted contact centre solution, one of the requests has been to consider which elements can be considered for virtualisation. The products in question for consideration are Oracle CallCallCenterAnywhere (CCA) and Cosmocom Call Universe (CCU).
Oracle CCA is officially end of life and now in extended support from Oracle - this doesn't stop people using it though and both my self and a number of consultants are still supporting this platform, testament to the guys at Telephony@Work who created this great product and shame on Oracle for end-of-life for the product. Fix Pack 10 supports Windows server 2008 - 32 bit only officially however the small print in the release notes indicates the executables have been tested to run on 64-bit Linux. This means there at least is the potential to support both HyperV and VMWare hypervisors.
That said the Cosmocom Call Universe product is now the only real alternative for multi-tenant host (Carrier scale) Contact Centre platform and thanks to the continued support and development fully support virtualisation. (footnote: I'm hoping for big things from Genesys Labs with their new cloud offering in this space).
Both CCA's and CCU's architecture support redundancy in their design, which means technologies such as live migration/vmotion are redundant in some respects for per data centre availability. However with 2 data centres the option for "WAN" live migration opens up the potential for a higher availability of the elements. This point requires careful consideration of the options. Since the other options open to is is just databased replication across the WAN to keep items in sync.
Having spent some time assessing VMWare vs. HyperV and product support of these hypervisors from Cosmocom - VMWare wins. Primarily on known to work on ESXi hypervisor, since CCU is currently only tested on Windows server 2008 with HyperV role. And secondary consideration is the footprint of the hypervisor with the the VMWare being a real light weight at around 512 Meg RAM!
2 comments:
You should consider Cisco HCS...
If it does genuine multi-tenant views for different customers with their own separated resources - rather than have to install lots of Cisco Call Managers then, yeah worthy of consideration. I'll have a read up on Cisco's website.
The solutions we look for are managed by us on behalf of the customer and segregated for management and MIS and scaling reasons.
I hate to sound prejudiced but Cisco generally doesn't come close on pricing cf. Oracle CCA and CosmoCom.
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