Looking Ahead
By Kevin Beale
Vice President for Software, Research and Development

This is the first edition of a new article I will be writing for each edition of Amtelco's Solutions Newsletter. An expanded version of this article also appears in the monthly Amtelco Insider newsletter Amtelco sends to all customers. Looking Ahead focuses on industry trends and new developments Amtelco is working on, providing information each of you can use in your future business planning.

This first Looking Ahead article examines soft switching which is a topic Amtelco has been focused on for quite some time. Soft switching is an industry development that has been gaining momentum over the last few years. Amtelco has long been the industry leader in switching with our XDS switching division. Amtelco and our customers have been fortunate that the Infinity switching platform has been so reliable and has continued to advance with updates such as integral call recording with Unity Logger and integral SIP trunking and operator audio with the Amtelco XDS VoIP board. Not all platforms have been so fortunate and this has driven the industry to move towards soft switching. Soft switching shifts the control and processing functions of the telephony away from telephony boards such as the Amtelco XDS VoIP board and to the computer CPU, with software controlling that CPU. Soft switching still requires a computer to run the switching functions, but offers advantages such as being capable of being virtualized since there are no specialized telephony boards installed in the computer.

Amtelco added soft switching to the Infinity Intelligent Series with a module called Genesis. Genesis was first released in 2013 as part of the IS 4.1 release that is now running at nearly 200 call centers. Genesis is tightly coupled with the advanced Intelligent Series applications and is administered within the IS Supervisor application. This provides the ability to add Genesis soft switching to an existing Infinity Intelligent Series installation to provide advanced call behaviors such as Smart-Paging, SmartCheckin, and MergeComm automated dispatching.

 

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IS Voice Services has a built-in Emergency ACD to route calls to SIP phones.
 
The Emergency ACD is a component of the Amtelco Genesis Soft Switch that provides a way to handle calls in a disaster situation. The Emergency ACD can distribute calls through a basic round robin ACD to operators who can answer the calls with the Amtelco Soft Agent application or with a SIP telephone or softphone. When paired with Soft Agent, call centers can continue to process Amtelco Intelligent Series applications such as scripting, on-call scheduling, directories, and message dispatch functions even though the primary ACD of the call center may not be functioning. This can be used to provide a hot backup for Infinity or other call center ACD's. 

Introduced at the National Amtelco Equipment Owners Conference in Orlando, FL, this is a game-changer. The attendees were very excited when they realized how this could streamline dispatching, increase efficiency and reduce errors.

Watch and see how MergeComm works

 

Telecommunications Users Network, Inc. (TUNe) is an association of telecommunications users sharing, exchanging and profiting from innovative ideas.

The 2015 conference was well attended and featured presentations and technical seminars. Debbie Bibber, TUNe member, gave an informative presentation on Outbound Caller.

www.telescan.net

June 23 - 25, La Jolla, California

This year's conference will focus on how to maximize the potential of your call center.

For more information