TeleWare gains flexibility by moving telecoms to the cloud

Microsoft partners worked together to scrap the physical data centre

Microsoft partners TeleWare and SoftwareONE believe that they have achieved a world first in moving all of TeleWare's telecoms services, as well as call recording and analysis, to the cloud, using Microsoft Azure. We talked to TeleWare CTO Rob Corrigill about the move.

The organisations stepped up their existing collaboration last year, when a Microsoft audit identified that many of the servers in TeleWare's data centre - where all of its call data was stored - were approaching end-of-life. As well as an estimated rebuild cost of £1 million, the company had been having issues with reliability and scalability of the infrastructure, and so decided to look elsewhere for a solution.

TeleWare decided to move all of its voice recording and analysis solutions, as well as its telecoms services, from the physical on-site data centre to the cloud, using Azure. Multiple issues were identified, but teams from TeleWare, SoftwareONE and Microsoft were able to find solutions and the first official public cloud call was made in September - although the whole platform was not moved to Azure until the end of October.

The original proposal was to stop all incoming and outgoing calls from the data centre, then back up the SQL database and move it to Azure. Once the backup was restored, call functionality would be restored. However, said Corrigill, this would have resulted in an estimated downtime of eight hours, which would have been "unacceptable" to TeleWare - the company supplies communications technology to three out of five FTSE 100 banks.

"The way TeleWare mitigated this...was to write a batch file that, when executed, would back-up the production databases, and simultaneously enable transaction logging," said Corrigill. "So TeleWare had a differential of the production database from the point of the backup going forwards. The batch file then copied the database backup to the new Azure infrastructure... At this stage in the process the platform and calls were still operating out of the old data centre. The batch file then executed some code which restored the transaction logs from the old SQL server to the new one and at the same time re-routed calls from TeleWare's old platform to the new one, which had been fully powered up and was ready to receive calls.

"This resulted in an outage of just 18 seconds whilst the calls were routed and the old SQL server was switched off after the transactions logs had been restored and validated."

Teleware and SoftwareONE signed a partnership agreement in March, which went to market this month. They are now working together to move other companies' call data to the cloud, having already done so with their first client, Akea Life.

Akea Life is a concierge doctor service in the north of England, which promises that a phone call will secure a same-day home visit by a private doctor. The call system, of course, is crucial to such a company.

Ben Paglia is the founder of MD of Akea Life. He told us that the solution was "extremely easy" to integrate into the business: "We discussed what we needed with TeleWare and they delivered it, plain and simple."

He continues, "We chose to use TeleWare's solution to support our compliance with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), training with the organisation and to increase customer experience."

Paglia says that Akea Life was so happy with the proposed solution from TeleWare that the company didn't need to consider any other products.