Looking Ahead to Soft Switching

Amtelco Cloud-Based Platform Solution

By Kevin Beale

Soft switching is an industry development that has been gaining momentum over the last few years. Amtelco has been focused on soft switching for quite some time, and we’ve long been an industry leader in hardware-based switching with our XDS switching division.

Amtelco and our customers have been fortunate that the Infinity switching platform has been so reliable and has continued to advance with updates such as integral call recording with Unity Logger, integral SIP trunking, and operator audio with the Amtelco XDS VoIP board.

Not all platforms have been so fortunate, and this has driven the industry to move towards soft switching. Soft switching shifts the control and processing functions of the telephony away from hardware, such as the Amtelco XDS VoIP board, to the computer CPU, with software controlling that CPU.

Soft switching still requires a computer to run the switching functions, but it offers advantages – such as being capable of being virtualized – since there are no specialized telephony boards installed in the computer.

Amtelco added soft switching to the Infinity Intelligent Series with a module called Genesis. First released in 2013 as part of the IS 4.1 release, Genesis is now running at nearly 200 call centers. Genesis is tightly coupled with the advanced Intelligent Series applications and is administered within the IS Supervisor application.

This provides the ability to add Genesis soft switching to an existing Infinity Intelligent Series installation in order to provide advanced call behaviors such as Smart-Paging, SmartCheckin, and MergeComm automated dispatching.

Amtelco continues to advance the Genesis soft switching platform. The current development focus for the 2015 release is to add advanced ACD call routing administered from the IS Supervisor application. The advanced ACD expands on the initial Genesis Emergency ACD first introduced in 2014.

We encourage anyone interested in soft switching and virtualization of your call center to contact Amtelco. We are excited about this opportunity to work with customers to enhance the services they can provide, further enhance the Infinity Intelligent Series platform, and move it into the future with advanced soft switching capabilities.

Kevin Beale is vice president for software, research and development, at Amtelco, a manufacturer and supplier of call center solutions located in McFarland, Wisconsin. Contact him by email at kbeale@amtelco.com.

[From Connection Magazine Jul/Aug 2015]

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