“
Multi tenancy Vs Multi Instance in
CCaaS / UCaaS clouds”
Having ACD box hosted in data center
& converting Capex to Opex is not
cloud. It needs different mindset,
Passion & deep pockets to create a
complete CC cloud offering!!
“If it works, why should I care?”
Don't make the common mistake of believing tenancy is the same as user or
multi-enterprise.
After spending over a decade in Unified Communications & Contact Center industry, I have put forward an attempt to share the learnings acquired in the UC/CC enterprise segment in various capacities and as a witness account subsequent transition into cloud.
At this point, after selling & successfully implementing CCaaS cloud for about 100 enterprises and around 5 Telecom Service Providers in some of the most complex and demanding markets, I find myself with a better understanding level on the ever changing definitions of UC Cloud foundations Viz. Multi Tenancy & Multi Instance.
Not just from one perspective of UCaaS cloud as Vendor, but also as
customer & then as Service provider. Adoption of cloud-based UC &
contact center infrastructure solutions is a worldwide phenomenon now
and all segments have tailored Multi tenancy and Multi instance views as
per their comfort and decision making situation. This paper provides an
analysis of all three aspects of this flourishing and highly competitive cloud UCaaS/CCaaS sector.
The three C’s i.e. Cost, Consolidation and Consistent customer experience across distributed virtualized centers in different geographies, driven by margin pressure and economic reasons, with its long-lasting impact has been powering the adoption of cloud-based contact center solutions. It all started with companies which needed
contact center infrastructure did not want to put up the capital to purchase it, have hesitantly tried cloud-based solutions as a short-term alternative in the past. These managers have soon realized that the
cloud-based business model has more benefits than challenges
Cloud-Based Topologies
Cloud-based computing is used in SaaS environments because resources are scalable and the allocation of services is determined by actual usage. This section presents the ideal (and increasingly common) high-level topology that is typically used to support cloud-based Unified Communications and contact centers. The primary objective of a cloud-based design is to allow the vendor and user to take advantage of multi-site connectivity while centralizing contact center services in the vendor’s data centers. Cloud-based topologies are intended to be distributed and load-balanced across multiple data center networks in order to provide resiliency in support of business continuity.
Multi-tenancy is one of the essential elements of cloud-based contact centers. Multi-tenancy is a
software architecture principle that allows a single instance of software to be run on a server while servicing multiple clients (tenants). Multi-tenant-based applications are designed to virtually partition every tenant’s data and configuration, allowing each client to create their own customized virtual application instance. Clients running in a cloud-based multi-tenant environment do not share or have access to each other’s data or configurations.
At a high level, the topologies for most of the cloud-based UC/ contact center infrastructure vendors should be very similar because the
concepts upon which these solutions are built are based on the same design principles. Where the
offerings differ is in how they approach resilience, redundancy and business continuity for their own environments and their clients.
Additionally, they also differ in their approach to multi-tenancy; most of the cloud-based infrastructure vendors use traditional multi-tenancy, as described above. Others employ virtualization, where each client gets their own dedicated virtual environment so that they are not sharing any of their contact center services or database.
The most common cloud-based topologies: 1. Multi-instance model
2. Multi-tenant” application model
“Multi-instance” and “Multi-tenant” architectures, and what are the pros and cons of each?
In fact, that’s a really important question with fairly significant implications for the UC/contact center. A multi-tenant architecture is where multiple customers
use a single instance of an application running on a single instance of an operating system on a common hardware platform.
In contrast, a multi-instance architecture is where multiple customers run their own separate instance of the application and operating system running on a
separate virtual machine, all on a common hardware platform. Many multi-tenant solutions leverage a common database instance, while both architectures
can support giving each customer their own database.
It’s important to understand that both architectures leverage common hardware and other resources for economies of sc ale, which results in competitive pricing and financial benefits for subscribers.
Here are some of the pros and cons of the architecture respectively:
Multi-Tenant Architecture
Sl. No Pros Cons
1 Cost effective - using common hardware & resources Higher development/testing efforts & cost for providers 2 Requires less hardware in provider data center Inherently less secure and isolated environment 3 Less time & resources required to update/upgrade large
numbers of customers
More chance that a provider, user or malicious behavior will impact performance and reliability of multiple customers
4 Better suited to support consumer scale applications (hundreds of thousands to millions of customers)
Less flexibility and control of configuration, updates and upgrades (timing, content controlled by provider and applied to all customers simultaneously), change management and SLAs
5 Requires less billing and contract management overhead Loss of investment if customer chooses to move to premise over time 6 Provider has greater insight into application usage and
behavior across customer base
Complex software architecture to support all users on same instance in a secure and reliable manner, especially as the number of customers grows
Multi-Instance Architecture
Sl. No Pros Cons
1 Cost effective based on the use of common hardware and resources
Higher operational effort and cost for Service providers
2 Inherently more secure and isolated environment Requires more hardware in the provider’s data center 3 Greater flexibility and control of configuration, updates and
upgrades (timing, content controlled by customer), change management and SLAs
More provider time and resources required to update/upgrade large numbers of customers
4 Less chance that a provider, user or malicious behavior will impact performance and reliability of multiple customers
Less suited to support consumer scale applications (hundreds of thousands to millions of customers)
5 Investment protection – ability to migrate to premise over time should business needs, preferences dictate
Requires more billing and contract management overhead
6 Simplicity in software architecture, especially as the number of customers grows
Provider has less insight into application usage and behavior across customer base
Too early to reach to any conclusion… right!
I have further tried using three different lenses to view the above two scenarios
Customer perspective
:
End users are not enamored of the capabilities, financial stability and maturity of many of the cloud-based solutions, but they are thrilled with the flexibility and options that this acquisition model gives them. End users no longer feel hostage to the high purchase and maintenance costs charged by the leading premise-based vendors. A growing number of end users in contact centers with anywhere from 1 to 1,000 agents have decided that the trade-offs are worth the risk. They are comfortable with this decision because they know that if they make a mistake in choosing a solution, they can easily switch to another product.
As a customer, why would I prefer a multi-instance architecture?
It really comes down to requirements and preferences, but the simple answer is that customers are able to enjoy the benefits associated with a cloud solution – increased flexibility, faster deployment time, minimal
upfront capital expense, and reduced IT staff requirements – while gaining a higher level of inherent security, reliability and control. For
those with stringent security and regulatory requirements (core banking financial services, government, healthcare, etc.), this can be important for moving contact center applications to the cloud. The thought of running the company’s mission critical operation on the same application instance as others, potentially competitors, just doesn’t sit well with some organizations. Speaking of mission critical, most people will agree that contact center applications are much different than CRM applications, which happen to run just fine in a multi-tenant environment.
Conclusion: So, the nature of the company, industry and application are
important factors when determining if a multi-instance architecture is preferred. You’re probably aware that advancements and maturity in
virtual server technology make it a safe and cost effective alternative to multi-tenant architectures. Multi-instance architectures also give
customers an additional level of investment protection by letting them migrate from a cloud to premise solution if and when their needs or strategy changes, and this isn’t possible with multi-tenant architectures.
Vendor Perspective:
Initial skepticism about cloud based solution is now seen off and it has clearly given way to a growing acceptance among end users in private and public institutions.
Of course funding of capital investments is limited in the current macro-economic environment and another reason - the contact center market
leader (a well-known name) is still struggling to come in terms of its acquisition of another CC giant has resulted is a new opportunity window for cloud players across the globe.
To seize this situation cloud-based contact center vendors are actively investing, enhancing their solutions and offering. So virtually taking the
early entrant advantage against the premise-based competitors to enter the market. Although much research and development (R&D) investment is being made to catch up to functionality that already exists in leading premise-based solutions, some of the cloud-based vendors are
introducing true product differentiators. They are also much more agile, which allows them to rapidly release capabilities to the market quickly.
On the other hand, Cloud thought process for many is entirely
multitenant, whose products were conceived and developed from their inception as SaaS or cloud-based solutions.
Categories of Cloud-Based Contact Center Infrastructure
Competitors
The following is the classification of cloud-based UCaaS /contact center as Service infrastructure providers
a. Service providers trying to create their own service layer with a product Mix leveraging their existing line of voice, network and DC service
b. Premise-based contact center vendors with a direct cloud-based offering
c. Premise-based contact center infrastructure vendors who sell their solution to cloud-based vendors
d. Contact center business process outsourcers (BPOs) e. Contact center system integrators and consultancies
f. Hosted IVR vendors who expand into the broader contact center infrastructure market
g. Cloud-based PBX providers who are expanding into contact center Conclusion: While many of the premise-based contact center
infrastructure vendors are still not fans of cloud-based solutions, they finally realized that it will be hurting them more to sit on the sidelines and watch their customers and prospects select these new competitors
than to risk cannibalizing their current revenue stream by coming out with a cloud-based capability. Though it took way too long, many of them
are now trying to catch up by introducing some form of cloud-based strategy or solution.
Service Provider Perspective:
Session Initiation Protocol is Facilitating the Transition to the Cloud The adoption of session initiation protocol (SIP) along with multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) data networks and the reduced cost of bandwidth are facilitating the transition to centralized data centers, both in enterprises and the cloud. In the contact center architecture of the
future, solutions – whether for routing, queuing, recording, quality assurance, customer relationship management or knowledge management – will all be considered “services” that reside as applications in the enterprise data network. This will allow them to be delivered across standardized networks to anywhere in the organization – a contact center, a remote site, an offshore location or the home of an agent, just as data is delivered today. As long as the solutions are already residing in a centralized environment, it doesn’t matter whether they are in an enterprise data center or the cloud. Increasingly, IT and business leaders are turning to their cloud-based partners for delivery of cost-effective redundancy and disaster
The one-size-fits-all upgrade approach isn’t as popular in these environments. Well, from my perspective, there aren’t many downsides to the multi-instance architecture from a customer or user perspective, if any. Some will say it takes longer to propagate software upgrades across
the entire customer base. While this can be true, I’ve found most contact center and unified communications customers prefer to have control over both content and timing of upgrades to ensure the business is ready and risk is properly managed.
Data Center-Centric Contact Center Infrastructure SIP
Data center-centric SIP model where all of the hosted contact center’s services are in a shared SIP-based environment within the vendor’s production data centers. In this design, all contact center services arecentrally hosted within the vendor’s data center environments. This
allows for the operation and access of identical services across their customer base. The cloud-based vendor can utilize a dual-carrier MPLS
network, to distribute basic and advanced contact center capabilities (services) to any user or location connected to their network.
Licenses or
Services
Data Center Redundancy:
Requires a minimum of two active data centers for redundancy and business continuity; data centers can be configured to support an active/passive or active/active configuration
Allows establishment of multiple data paths between cloud-based data centers to ensure access to contact center applications and services
Uses best practices to ensure that each data center is sized to handle 100% of all customer traffic during peak hours
Ensures that no single point of failure exists for all contact center sessions for calls, emails, SMS, chat, videos and collaboration
Network & Voice:
Employs multiple carrier routing paths for all interactions and access to data centers
Deploys SIP trunks to handle primary data & voice needs
Delivers all interactions to agents over the MPLS network as SIP sessions
Has agents using SIP-based endpoints registered back to the vendor’s call control environment
Adding to these, the below also carry significant make or break attributes
Right commercial models(case specific-flexible)
Right bundling
End to end SLA
Clear Service- Support Framework
I conclude as:
A service provider should have both the options of Multi tenancy as well as multi instance offering globally available with at least two technology players and on the basis of customer requirements or segment demand, appropriate solution should be pitched
Ideally Service Providers should work with System Integrators rather
than competing against them as a System Integrator can never become a service provider and conversely the attempt of the other is also not good.
The core strategy of a service provider as cloud player should be clear
and acceptance to say no to premise based capex to opex deals should also prevail, as there will be no value add
Cloud-based contact center solutions may not be
appropriate for 100% segments or departments today, but they
have altered the UC/contact center competitive landscape for
the better.
End users have more choices of vendors and options
than ever before, which gives them great leverage in negotiating
a deal. However, buyers still have to be careful and must
appreciate that there still are substantial differences between the
solutions.
Additionally, given the large number of new competitors,
in next 5 years, more than 50% of the current competitors will
either be merged with another company or out of business.
Like Data center business, big global Service Providers
will rule this market along with OEM. Or OEMs will be forced to
migrate their business model to usage cloud based offerings
threatening their on premise run rate, AMCs etc. System
Integrators will also change their mode of survival and will be
seen more as resellers, partners or enablers for both above
End users looking for a new UCaas /CCaaS solution are
encouraged to follow best practices for selecting applications, and
to invest the time and resources necessary to craft contracts that
include vendor management programs and service level
agreements to protect them for both the short and long term.
My advice for customers evaluating cloud-based contact
center and unified communications solutions is to ensure their
corporate strategy drives supporting departmental and
technology requirements. If security and privacy are critical
success criteria, then do your due diligence to understand how
each offering addresses your specific requirements. It’s also
important to realize providers taking the same architectural
approach can implement solutions in very different ways.
Ankush Gangwani, the author has co-authored one of the most successful Cloud CCaaS Strategy on
multi-tenanted shared cloud Business, Incidentally he is cofounder of next upcoming Multi Instance global Cloud CCaaS
business as well for a leading global Service Provider. He brings in more than decade of Unified Communications &
contact center domain experience on premise as well as cloud.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankushg