The Challenge

With more and more consumers seeking out the personalized service they can only achieve through their local branch, this customer touch point is becoming an ever more critical focal point in various industries like financial services. To better understand customer and market dynamics, service organizations would like to capture all of their customer interaction at the branch level. Furthermore, new and stricter regulations are driving the need to record these customer interactions easily and affordably with a low TCO.

There are many cases when the recording devices have to be deployed locally in the branches. There are lots of requirements and functions that have to be considered, to implement a cost-effective multi-site recording solution. Click on other tabs to learn, how CARIN meets all of these requirements smoothly and effectively.

The Solution

The CARIN recording suite was one of the first solutions that offered true multi-site voice, video and telepresence recording capabilities for the enterprise. Today, hundreds of branches are powered by CARIN, which enables our customers to comply with the demanding business environment. Here are some highlights from the real advantages of the CARIN branch recording solution:

  • Fully centralized solution with distributable system components
  • The remote sites or branches are running a lightweight store-and-forward module called the Local Recorder (only if the local deployment of the recorder is unavoidable, there are other option with CARIN to centrally record interactions)
  • Very low TCO, because of the low HW and SW requirements (entry level PC server)
  • Fair and favorable Ownership and Maintenance costs due to the centralized management, storage, archiving and playback
  • WAN failure resiliency
  • Support for Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST)
  • Support for blade servers and VMware servers for even smaller footprint
  • Support for video and telepresence in addition to voice
  • Full-featured compliance recording solution to meet the strict regulations and mitigate risk
  • Hundreds of reference sites

Architecture

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Cisco AXP based solutions

There is a lot of buzz around Cisco's new Application eXtension Platform (AXP). With the Cisco AXP, you can easily integrate the branch network, applications, and IT infrastructure. This green solution is backed by a complete development and support system. It promotes branch optimization, lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) and increases manageability. Cisco AXP is accompanied by a complete developer and partner ecosystem to help make the model successful.

Some of the call recording vendors are offering branch recording on this platform also. TC&C, the global provider of call recording platform for enterprises, strives to assist network engineers, IT managers and decision makers to have a better understanding of the pros and cons of the AXP solution and clearly highlight the potential pitfalls regarding branch recording.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

The AXP technology itself provides excellent TCO if several applications are deployed on the blade, but resource intensive applications like call recording do not allow other systems to be deployed on the AXP card (only a few others).

Because of this limitation the TCO of a stand-alone recorder is much better than an AXP based one. The list price of the AXP blade with the corresponding IOS software option is x3-x5 times higher than an entry level server and operating system.
Performance and Scalability

Due to the lack of system resources available on the AXP blades, a highly resource intensive application like a call recorder is fairly limited regarding the capacity. The other issue with the high amount of resource requirement is that it prevents users from unleashing the true power of the AXP solution, because very few applications are allowed to run in addition to the recording system.

Having a dedicated server running the recorder application with the same store and forward functionality does not suffer from these limitations. The performance and scalability of this approach is far superior than the AXP based one.
Router requirements

The AXP based recorders require the bigger blades, which are only available in the bigger router series (2800 and 3800 series), which are not often available in the branches.
Next Generation Call Recorders

TC&C is aware of the AXP solution and committed to support it in the future once the performance of the blades will be mature enough to enable the deployment of the call recording applications in an effective manner. We are also planning to include our unique video recording engine to enable the recording of virtual/video experts in the branches.

We also have to note that the future platform of the call recording functionality in e.g. Cisco UC environment is the centralized, built-in recording support (referred as native or Dual Media Streaming DMS recording or RTP forking). This new technology is already available in CARIN and provides a real advantage for multi-site deployments by eliminating the need for deploying any device in the branches.