Niraj Bhatt – Architect's Blog
Ruminations on .NET, Architecture & Design
Verint Architecture
This is an offbeat post. Recently I was attending Verint training which happens to be a COTS product for managing your Call Center requirements. These requirements include the ones like Call Recording, Screen Capture, Quality management of calls / Scoring, Reports, etc. In this post I will jot down the basics of Verint Architecture I could collect from session.
Verint like any other Call Center Management related product taps into your incoming PSTN network via PBX and CTIinterface. CTI interface raises events on various activities, for instance whenever there is an incoming call to your contact center. From here Verint takes over and starts recording the call. Verint also supports Screen capture in case your business needs one.
Verint has a tiered architecture in form of – Acquisition Server, Hub & Data Center. Verint distinguishes between Hub & Data Center for high volume scenarios, otherwise it bundles both together into something called AIO (All-In-One) Server.
Acquisition Server is where modules like VAM (Voice Acquisition Module) & SAM (Screen Acquisition Module) run. Recorded calls are stored here temporarily, and corresponding call detail is captured (Verint calls it as Contact detail). The recorded call files are moved from Acquisition Server to Hub Server via FTP. And the Contact details which are stored in SQL Server are transferred to Hub Server via MSMQ. There is a purging service on Acquisition Server which can purge recorded calls data on disk space available, duration, etc.
Hub Servers appeal seems to be there from a Latency (performance) standpoint. They get Contact details & recorded voice calls from Acquisition Server. Acquisition server has a relatively small storage and relies on Hub for larger storage. All the recorded voice calls needs to be backed up (archived) from Hub Server itself. But unlike them Contact details are synced with Data Center again via MSMQ. I am not quite sure of the motivation in handling these two differently. Verint Portal is also deployed on Hub Server.
Data Center Servers are the ones that have entire Contact database available with them. They also have reporting tools, data warehouse, application database (scoring for instance), speech analytics etc. as part of their system. Data Center seems to handling everything apart from recorded calls which are archived at Hub level.
