Executive Summary WHAT IS DRIVING THE PUSH FOR HIGH AVAILABILITY?

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1 MINIMIZE CUSTOMER SERVICE DISRUPTION IN YOUR CONTACT CENTER GENESYS SIP % AVAILABILITY PROVIDES QUALITY SERVICE DELIVERY AND A SUPERIOR RETURN ON INVESTMENT TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary...1 What is Driving the Push for High Availability...1 What Causes Service Interruptions?...2 Measurement of Availability...3 Genesys SIP Solution Achieving % Availability...3 High Availability in Genesys Solutions...4 Types of High Availability...4 Genesys High Availability Framework...5 Manageability of the Solutions.6 Conclusion...6 Executive Summary In today s competitive business environment, maintaining the High Availability of contact center assets has become a strategic necessity for both enterprises and service providers as ensuring that the customer service operation remains reliably available is a key factor for retaining customers, as well as creating new business opportunities. Correspondingly, a highly available solution is a critical attribute because disruptions of service result in a loss of customers and revenue. In such cases, the system is said to be mission critical, and downtime needs to be kept to an absolute minimum by implementing strategies that both avoid loss of service, and quickly resolve downtimes when they do occur. This paper offers general insights into topics related to High Availability, including common terminology, reasons to address the availability issue, and the main events that affect availability. Further, it discusses Genesys approach to achieving % (5x9 s) availability, and outlines the key attributes designed into Genesys SIP solutions that accomplish high overall contact center availability and service levels. WHAT IS DRIVING THE PUSH FOR HIGH AVAILABILITY? The pressure to deliver a quality customer experience has increased drastically in these tough economic times, and having a highly reliable customer service operation gives both enterprises and service providers a strong competitive advantage. Therefore, High Availability is increasingly seen as a crucial requirement within contact centers. The primary reason to address the availability problem is the fundamental financial reality that downtime is costly, due to: Customer dissatisfaction Downtime can result in customer dissatisfaction and an erosion of trust. It may further cause customer churn and increase the cost of customer retention. Loss of revenues Downtime will result in loss of business, because transactions cannot be completed. A main driver for implementing a High Availability solution is to ensure the quality and effectiveness of service operations and to secure the business outcome.

2 Minimize Customer Service Disruption in Your Contact Center / page 2 Loss of information Downtime also blocks access to information and even causes loss of data. Loss of productivity Downtime means that customer service agents cannot properly perform their jobs. Conversely, robust reliability maximizes utilization of resources, which helps achieve quality service delivery and results in a superior return on investment. WHAT CAUSES SERVICE INTERRUPTIONs? Operational outages can be classified in two main categories: predicted (planned) and unpredicted (unplanned). While both categories result in service disruptions, an unpredicted downtime impacts a company more negatively. However, predicted downtimes can be managed with proper advanced planning. 5% 30% 40% 30% Software 40% Software Failures Hardware People Planned Downtime Environment 15% 10% 5% 5% Client Software Network Software Figure 1: Causes of Downtime Causes of Planned Downtimes Include: Maintenance Upgrades Backups Causes of Unplanned Downtimes Include: Hardware failure such as disk and network failures, or loss of power Software failure can be operating system, middleware or application Environment such as climate, temperature and natural disasters People including careless mistakes, or incorrect user manipulation

3 Minimize Customer Service Disruption in Your Contact Center / page 3 MEASUREMENT OF AVAILABILITY Availability is a measure of the time that a system is operating normally. It is a function of mean time between failure (MTBF) and mean time to repair (MTTR), and it is usually expressed as a percentage of hours per year (also called nines, for example, 99.99% uptime is four nines ) during which the system provides a specific level of service as needed. The following table shows the availability for a 24x7x365 system. Availability for a contact center describes the uptime, or period of time when the solution is available to process customer interactions at the proper level. Table 1: Availability = Availability Metrics Uptime Total Time = Uptime Uptime + Downtime = MTBF MTBF+ MTTR Availability % Downtime per year hours, 45 minutes ( four nines ) 52.6 minutes ( five nines ) 5.26 minutes GENESYS SIP SOLUTION ACHIEVING % AVAILABILITY Releases 8.0 and 8.1 have been validated in achieving beyond % (5x9 s) availability with best practices and product design attributable to unplanned downtime of less than five minutes per year. Availability assessment is based on Markov State Space modeling, which is a generally recognized methodology both for hardware and software solutions. Based on best practices, Markov Models are used for the calculation of feasible availability for each of the components of the Genesys SIP Solution. Availability measurement has been conducted on the Genesys SIP Solution via the following approaches: Robustness Testing Failure Rate Prediction Platform Availability Analysis Genesys delivers high quality and robust customer service solutions. Genesys was first certified at SEI CMM (Capability Maturity Model) Maturity Level-3 in August 2005, and afterwards successfully assessed at CMMI v1.2 Maturity Level-3. CMMI is the latest framework for software development from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, and is a universally accepted and internationally recognized quality framework. Genesys continues to follow CMMI best practices in its SIP development, which increases its fault prevention capabilities, improving reliability.

4 Minimize Customer Service Disruption in Your Contact Center / page 4 Based upon overall Genesys system architecture and design, High Availability has been incorporated into at various levels of Genesys SIP Solution Releases 8.0 and 8.1, including: SIP High Availability Media /Stream Manager High Availability Universal Routing High Availability Stat High Availability Genesys software solutions from are designed to improve availability by addressing common potential outage situations in specifically appropriate ways. In particular, the Genesys software solutions are engineered to support several common generic system attributes or parameters, which either prevent the occurrence of events that impact availability, or can minimize the impact of such events when they do occur. In effect, the ability to appropriately secure these generic system attributes represents insurance against the hazards that most commonly cause unplanned downtimes. Note that Genesys availability measurement covers product-related outages only. Outages caused by third-party equipment and infrastructure are excluded from Genesys coverage. HIGH AVAILABILITY IN GENESYS SOLUTIONS High Availability provides service continuity in the event of hardware failures and critical software failures (software failures that require the affected component to be re-started). High Availability is implemented through the use of redundant hardware and software, together with software mechanisms that detect, isolate and recover automatically in the event of a failure. All components of the Genesys SIP Solution support High Availability. Types of High Availability / Backup High Availability Most Genesys applications support a / Backup High Availability model. In this model, the instance is monitored by Genesys Management Layer. In the event that the fails, Management Layer instructs the Backup to take the role, and continue processing. A Heartbeat interruption Down message Synchronization Figure 2: Hot Standby Mechanism Solution Instruction to change mode to B Instruction to change mode to Backup There are two types of / Backup High Availability applications: Hot Standby and Warm Standby. Hot Standby High Availability Hot Standby High Availability is supported for applications that are critical to call processing, such as Genesys SIP and Universal Routing. Hot Standby applications support synchronization of critical data from the to the Backup, allowing the Backup to resume processing with little or no loss of calls. In addition, clients of Hot Standby applications establish parallel connections to both the and Backup, allowing for seamless failover.

5 Minimize Customer Service Disruption in Your Contact Center / page 5 A Heartbeat interruption Down message Solution Figure 3: Warm Standby Mechanism Instruction to change mode to Instruction to change mode to B Backup Warm Standby High Availability Warm Standby applications do not synchronize data from to Backup, and clients do not establish parallel connections. During failover of a Warm Standby application, there is a brief interruption to service, but this interruption does not result in lost calls. Load-Balanced High Availability Load-Balanced High Availability architectures are comprised of two types of components: a server, which provides a particular type of service, and a load distributor, which distributes the incoming workload across multiple servers. The load distributor typically distributes workload equally between the servers on a round-robin basis. In some cases, the load distributor must support session persistence, also known as sticky sessions, to ensure that subsequent requests within a given session are sent to the same server as the first request. Parallel Mode High Availability Parallel Mode High Availability architectures are comprised of multiple components that perform identical processing in parallel. This is different from load balancing in that the workload is duplicated rather than distributed. A Genesys component that is typically deployed with Parallel Mode High Availability is Interaction Concentrator (ICON). In each case where ICON must collect data from a Genesys application, two copies of ICONs are deployed and then configured to collect identical data. This mechanism protects against loss of reporting data in the event that one ICON temporarily fails. (LCA) monitors and controls applications on one server Solution (SCS) monitors and controls all applications in system via LCA SIP (P) Stat (P) URS (B) LCA SCS (P) Genesys High Availability Framework In addition to High Availability at various solution Sync Standby High Availability applications synchronize state from (P) to Backup (B) Sync SIP (B) Stat (B) URS (P) LCA SCS (B) component levels, High Availability capability has Backup been incorporated in the management framework. Figure 4 shows a hypothetical system configuration that illustrates some of the key aspects of High Availability management in Genesys systems. With such a framework, Solution (SCS) manages the service state of all Genesys components in a system. This includes starting and stopping components, and managing their High Availability / Backup state. SCS operates in conjunction with multiple instances of (LCA). One instance of LCA is installed on each physical host, and provides the interface between SCS and the individual components installed on the host. Figure 4: Genesys High Availability Management

6 Minimize Customer Service Disruption in Your Contact Center / page 6 Manageability of the Solutions Management solutions can also contribute to improving system uptime by providing centralized and remote management, troubleshooting and problem resolution. The Genesys Management Layer provides: Centralized solution control and monitoring for real-time status of solutions, and for activating and deactivating solutions or applications. Centralized logging that record maintenance events logged by any application in one central location for easy access and troubleshooting. Flexible alarm signaling from any maintenance event logged by any application. It also can automatically forward the alert message wirelessly to a system manager. Fault management functions, consisting of detection, isolation and correction of applications failures. For non-redundancy configuration it provides an automatic re-start of the applications that fail. For redundant configurations, a switchover is triggered. CONCLUSION Genesys is committed to helping enterprises and service providers employ strategies to avoid service disruptions and quickly resolve downtimes. By implementing Genesys SIP-based solutions, organizations can meet the goal of High Availability in their contact centers to ensure that they provide consistent customer service, decrease customer churn, and thrive in today s tough economic climate. With the target of achieving % (5x9 s) reliability, Genesys fully-integrated contact center solutions offer the opportunity to strengthen customer interactions, increase revenue and improve operational efficiency. Genesys product enhancements will further improve reliability by leveraging virtualization and cloud computing, and offering dynamic scalability and elasticity for enterprise and hosted deployments. Corporate Headquarters Genesys 2001 Junipero Serra Blvd. Daly City, CA USA Worldwide Inquiries: Tel: Fax: About Genesys Genesys is a leading provider of customer experience and contact center solutions. With over 3,500 customers in 80 countries, Genesys orchestrates more than 100 million customer interactions every day across the contact center and back office. Genesys helps customers power optimal customer experiences that deliver consistent, seamless and personalized experiences across all touchpoints, channels and interactions. For more information visit: or call GENESYS. Genesys and the Genesys logo are registered trademarks of Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All other company names and logos may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved v1-11/12