Empirix Announces Availabilty Of Hammer On-Call And Voicewatch Disaster Recovery Services
Company’s test and monitoring services help customers ensure critical Call Centre infrastructure remains operational during unforeseen interruptions
October 30, 2007 – Empirix® Inc., which helps organisations adopt complex communications solutions with confidence, today announced the release of its Hammer On-Call® and VoiceWatch® Disaster Recovery Services. These offerings have been created to help enterprises ensure that interruptions in power, carrier circuits, and Contact Centre infrastructure and applications failover gracefully and as planned, minimising the impact on customers.
Empirix’s Hammer On-Call has been enhanced to include disaster recovery testing and new functions within its graphical user interface (GUI). Customers employing the new service work closely with Empirix test experts to characterise production and disaster recovery environments and devise a test plan that is best suited for their unique needs, based on Empirix’s proven disaster recovery testing methods.
Through the Hammer On-Call Disaster Recovery Service, Empirix emulates thousands of calls coming into the production contact centre and “what if” scenarios can be tested to ensure that customer calls are resolved in accordance with the previously-developed disaster recovery test plan. The test scenarios typically allow for multi-carrier verification and capacity on dedicated T1 circuits to failover locations or load balanced facilities. Following this test, metrics for call handling can then be verified against the goals set forth in the Disaster Recovery plan.
Other important scenarios the Hammer On-Call Disaster Recovery Service can reproduce include:
• System recovery tested under production loads that emulate ‘real’ failures, which could occur on the T1 lines and power circuits, network outages, call routing strategies and database infrastructures;
• System outage monitors tested to ensure alerts are functioning properly prior to an outage; and
• The ability to take testing the infrastructure components offline to analyse the types of messages that specific devices produce, then add those alerts to the production and disaster recovery monitoring strategies.
Empirix’s VoiceWatch Disaster Recovery Monitoring Service verifies that critical Call Centre infrastructure remains operational in the event a disaster should occur. This service features:
• A constant monitoring of the backup infrastructure by conducting real customer transactions at regular intervals, 24x7;
• Exercising the back-up systems to ensure they remain operational and in compliance with the systems;
• Alerts to notify support personnel of any failures or non-compliance issues with back-up systems so they can be addressed in an orderly manner; and
• Weekly reports that are generated and can be easily evaluated for any non-standard behaviour.
As Greg Levin, Creative Projects Coordinator at ICMI and one of the authors of “Contact Centre Disaster Recovery” notes, "Given the increasingly critical role that contact centres play in business today – and how much invaluable customer data they capture and house -- it's essential that centres have a formal business continuity/disaster recovery plan (BCP/DRP) in place. Without a detailed and feasible BCP/DRP – one that is fully understood by all departments involved in its deployment, and that carefully incorporates the unique requirements of the contact centre – an organisation risks losing massive profits and alienating its entire customer base during times of crisis."
“With the unpredictability of today’s world, companies are realising more and more not only the importance, but the true necessity of having a disaster recovery plan for their Call Centres,” said Jeff Weil, Vice President, Services and Support at Empirix. “One thing all of our customers have in common is their desire to offer their users the best experience possible. By implementing our Disaster Recovery Services, they are ensuring that with the occurrence of a catastrophic event, their customers will not experience any interruption in service or support, something that not only will enhance their customer loyalty efforts, but is a key factor to maintaining a competitive advantage in an often crowded marketplace.”
