Interactive Intelligence has moved its all-in-one omnichannel customer engagement cloud service, Communications as a Service (CaaS), to an OpenStack and Ceph-based private cloud from Red Hat. Based on its internal testing, Interactive Intelligence reports that the Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage solution has cut its time to deploy from a few weeks to minutes.
Interactive Intelligence is a global leader of cloud services for customer engagement, communications and collaboration. Its CaaS offering provides on-demand cloud services for midsize and large contact centers to help improve the customer experience and reduce operational costs. The solution’s initial success led to an increase in customer demand, placing strain on resources.
Interactive Intelligence needed a platform that could accommodate growth with minimal impact on stability or increasing costs. The company also wanted to remove human error from its environment by increasing automation. Interactive Intelligence's calculations showed that nearly 70 percent of the stability issues in its existing environment were human related, and manual processes were too slow.
To meet these needs, Interactive Intelligence deployed Red Hat OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable and production-ready OpenStack solution, and Red Hat Ceph Storage, a highly scalable and open software-defined storage platform, for their enterprise-level stability and support, as well as their combined capabilities. The new Red Hat-based platform can automate processes from networking and scaling to allocating compute and storage resources, protecting Interactive Intelligence from human error.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform delivers a cost-effective, mature cloud solution with a long life span, regular new releases, and easy deployment. Interactive Intelligence found Red Hat Ceph Storage, a solution that is popular for OpenStack deployments because of its tight integration with OpenStack, offered an accommodating architecture and the flexibility and scalability it was looking for to support its CaaS infrastructure.
With Red Hat, Interactive was able to access a robust OpenStack partner ecosystem where many partners have been certified to run their software solutions on Red Hat OpenStack Platform. PLUMgrid is one of these partners providing the software-defined networking (SDN) solution for Interactive Intelligence.
In addition to significantly cutting its time to deploy, Interactive Intelligence has not experienced any outages. The company has experienced similar improvements in stability and reliability for other workloads moved to the Red Hat solution, and is now moving its workloads to the new platform. And, with OpenStack’s automation capabilities, Interactive Intelligence can more easily and automatically accommodate growth with additional virtual machines.
