SCALABILITY

The first and most obvious concern for larger organizations is whether a proposed infrastructure solution can scale to service all corporate sites. How that scalability is achieved is also an issue. Some solutions will enable you to centralize all IT resources in a single data center for use across the enterprise. Fewer are those that will enable you to share resources distributed across different sites as a unified solution. This latter approach is preferred for system resiliency and real-time disaster recovery. But either way, achieving maximum economies of scale requires a solution that enables all sites to share common hardware, software licenses, and phone lines. The problem for owners of older systems is that traditional enterprise solutions can’t scale sufficiently to support large-scale, multisite operations. Newer, network-based technologies, however, can easily scale to meet this critical objective.

Unfortunately, while many vendors claim to be network-based, what they generally mean is that their technology is distributed across multiple servers that perform specific tasks on a network. True network-based software architectures—such as Oracle Contact Center Anywhere—eliminate traditional scalability limitations by spreading mission-specific system processes across servers. The network essentially becomes one large computer, with system processes communicating with each other over the network. This redefines scalability as a flexible barrier limited only by the physical processing resources of the network. Need to scale? Plug in another server. This is important because many companies need the ability to increase capacity simply by adding more nodes and resources to the network.