The telephony system in call centers is a critical component that is the heart of the operation. Any disruption to the normal flow of the phone calls will result in a significant damage to the business. For example, let’s look at a busy call center that is unable to accept new calls for few minute due to some failure in the telephony infrastructure, you can surely imagine how much damage this will cause both to its reputation and also to its business. In case of an emergency call center the impact of such a failure is greater since for this call center any failure in the telephony system can be a matter of life and death.

SoliCall’s products for call centers improves, in real-time, the audio quality of phone calls. Specifically, SoliCall’s products attenuate ambient noise of the call center using advanced noise reduction capabilities. In order to perform this task our noise reduction software is installed in the audio path of the calls and therefore become part of the telephony infrastructure which should maintain high availability.

In this post, we will concentrate on a solution called SoliCall Connect to understand how this solution handles the high availability (HA) requirement. Let’s start with a brief overview of the SoliCall Connect architecture. SoliCall Connect has two main components as follows:

1. PBXMate for Call Centers. A server component that is responsible for performing the centralized noise reduction.

2. SoliCall Pro. A client component that is responsible for communicating with the softphone, performing standalone audio filtering and communicating with the PBXMate server to perform the centralized noise reduction.

All our software components have extensive proven track record of stability and robustness. Nevertheless there might be malfunctions that are out of our hand for example due to a network or hardware failure. Now, let’s see what happens in case of an unfortunate network or hardware failure. In case of a network failure or a server failure that prevents SoliCall Pro client from communicating with the PBXMate server, SoliCall Pro client is designed to automatically bypass the PBXMate server to avoid disruption to the normal flow of the audio in the call.  Once PBXMate server is accessible again, SoliCall Pro client will resume using it to perform the centralized noise reduction. As you can see, this architecture enables SoliCall Connect solution to offer not only high-availability but actually a built-in fault-tolerance capability. This fault-tolerance capability is achieved using a robust distributed architecture with a built-in fail-over mechanism.

In addition to the above, another layer of robustness can be added within the PBXMate product itself as the PBXMate has an internal fail-over mechanism.