Want to transform your legacy infrastructure for IVR, call recording, PBXs and more?

Legacy infrastructure has challenges

Traditionally, multimedia communications solutions or applications such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), call recording, cloud hosted PBXs, voice attendants and voice mails are built around physical or virtual media servers and call routing servers.

While this infrastructure has served you well, a modern cloud-native communications platform would significantly reduce the cost and time for you to build the offerings and implement them at your customers, anywhere, anytime and at any scale.

If your legacy infrastructure is approaching the end of life (EoL) stage in the product life cycle it is an indication that there are benefits waiting for you when moving to a modern infrastructure. When the support and maintenance are ceasing, license agreements terminating and the possibility to find key competence is getting harder, the total cost for continuing using the legacy infrastructure will inevitably rise.

Continue reading to learn some of the characteristics of a modern communications platform that are key for unified communications (UC) providers when building modern multimedia solutions and applications.

So, what are the characteristics of a modern communications platform?

Many are planning to move their infrastructure, or at least parts of it, to the cloud. It is a general trend across many industries to move towards a cloud-based setup. However, the notion of “moving to the cloud” is wide and needs to be accompanied with a more specific discussion.

Delivery model and building practice

The delivery model of a cloud-based infrastructure is one aspect that needs to be looked at. Another is the building practice, i.e., how are the functions that are needed for your specific offering built in the cloud and how do they utilize the cloud resources. Examples of functions needed to build multimedia communications solutions such as IVR, call recording, cloud-hosted PBXs, voice attendants or voice mails are: media playback, interactive call control, DTMF handling etc. Also, the way the software is designed plays an important role.

Let’s first look at the delivery model. A true modern infrastructure such as a communications platform is delivered as a managed service, not as virtual or physical servers that require maintenance, or as virtualized software in the cloud that you need to run and keep up to date. Easy-to-use APIs let you call upon the capabilities enabled by the managed service delivery model and allow you to build the solutions or applications that your end customers need.

Second, let’s look into how the platform is built in the cloud. This is an important aspect to understand as it directly translates to the benefits you get.

Serverless backend

A communications platform built with a serverless backend provides automatic autoscaling, allowing unlimited and effortless scalability. It automatically and instantaneously allocates the resources needed in the cloud that are triggered by an increase in traffic volume or expansion into a new geographic territory.

Furthermore, with a pay-only-for-what-you-use model, it significantly reduces the cost and avoids any over-capacity issues that a dedicated hardware or virtualized server model implies.

Microservice-based software architecture

A microservice architecture, as opposed to a monolithic architecture, will allow for quicker and more frequent updates and upgrades of your offerings. With the long release handling and fixed roadmap cycles (often 12-18 months), typically associated with a monolithic software architecture, a microservice designed communications platform has significant benefits in its fast speed of adaptations and innovations.