Part 2: SIP Based Call Centres - 12 years on - Time for a light weight cloud approach to contact centre architectures

So what does a cloud architected contact centre look like? I guess looking at from an architectural requirements:

• No Single Point of failure
• NoSQL Database for "Big Data" based Agent and caller statistics (not mandatory but useful)
• Scalable transaction engine for orchestration of resources - linking customers with agents and agents and supervisors (We used to call this a queue and scheduler - or just the ACD)
• Media Relay/Anchoring so that recording of the session can take place.
• Light weight client applications (HTML5, CSS, Javascript, WebRTC).
• Elasticity on demand compute - to scale for more sessions, more agents etc. Or for that matter less.
• Some form of orchestration to be able to dynamically scale the platform based on either dynamic demand or customer requirements. Dynamic demand is an interesting one here as it implies the platform can "self-scale".
• Multi-tenancy, so we can accommodate multiple customers without them "bleeding" into each other.
• Support for SIP Signalling (to be able to connect to telcos using SIP trunking)
• Transcoding of codecs voice (& video).
• Conference bridge/RTP mixer, to make supervisor passive monitoring of agents  possible.

So that's the high level requirements out of the way.  How might you lego-brick build such an idea as a prototype? I'd start with Freeswitch and Kamailio/OpenSIPS, and I think I might even look at commercial SIP to WebRTC gateway like Genband's SPIDR.

For the Virtualisation piece I guess I would start with OpenStack and/or Xen hypervisors.

That's my shopping list. Next time some pictures of the components and glue-ing them together.

Online homework and social media pose parental dilemma - What!

Is it just me or do articles like this, on the BBC website make you annoyed too?

** Parents face online homework dilemma **
Parents feel unable to make children study by blocking internet access, as homework often requires online research, a survey suggests.



The problem here (IMHO) is education - not the children you understand, but the parents, there are so many ways to protect and inform children about the Internet, and most of them are free.


The best free tool around I have found is OpenDNS, this give parent control of not only every device in the house, but also allows you to protect friends children too who Bring Their Own Devices.


Windows and iOS have darn good parental controls too, its just about setting them up and discussing it with your children. - Even Google and YouTube - if you create an account can be set with parental controls too.


There are no excuses... BUT - we need to educate the parents.....