Beena Jacob, Director, Product Development

Donoma is always striving to improve the customer experience, whether it’s innovative features; or processes that makes our software robust and scalable. This technical series is designed to shed light on how our team is looking ahead and planning for new functionality, more security, more agility, even how Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be woven into our solutions. Our first discussion will be focused on providing context and background on cloud native, as well as how we’ve already begun to implement its principals into our solutions. Let’s dive in!

Exactly What is Cloud Native?

Cloud native is currently one of the leading trends in the computer industry. As the ecosystem around cloud-native technologies grows, it will become the competitive differentiator that will keep your company relevant in the future.

Cloud native is about innovating rapidly, improving scalability, and reducing operation costs, all while managing risks at a smaller scale. Let’s explore each one of these cloud-native fundamentals.

Innovating rapidly:In the past, the norm was to avoid risk and move slowly and carefully. How about releasing ideas to production within days or even within hours? Cloud native approach helps you get your ideas to the market fast by doing small incremental steps so that it can be reversible if needed. Risks become more manageable while accelerating change.

Improving Scalability:When ideas are released to market faster and as your business grows, you will need to support more users, locations, devices and scalability becomes critical.

Reducing operation costs:When business grows, you’ll need to plan your infrastructure needs and operation costs. With platform-as-a-service you can provision and pay for only what is needed.

So, whether a business is an enterprise or a startup, cloud native is applicable for both. Its strategy is all about reducing technical risks while innovating rapidly. Cloud native can be extremely powerful, but it does involve considerable amount of technical challenges and a cultural shift in your business.

How Does Cloud Native Work?

Cloud Native Can Look Like Many Things!

Like the story of the blind men and an elephant, cloud native might seem like it has different meanings, but this is not the case. The core components that make up cloud native each play a vital role in the implementation of cloud-native applications. Let’s dive briefly into each one:

Microservices:Microservices, also known as microservices architecture, is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of services that are loosely coupled, independently deployable, and organized around business domains.

Containers: Containers make it easy to test processes and dependencies, as well as move and deploy.

Orchestration Tools:Orchestration helps with tasks such as scaling, configuration, rolling updates, etc.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service:Services can run on servers that can be provisioned on demand.

Continuous delivery:With automated testing and container packages, deployment to production is continuous.

How We’ve Already Begun Our Journey to Cloud Native

At Donoma, we’ve already begun our journey to cloud native, and are approaching it full-speed ahead. What do we mean by this? We’ve already taken the initiative to implement cloud-native principals into our solutions. We’ll use our product, OneView, as an example. OneView was created to provide insight and analytics for unified communication systems. When we developed the solution a few years back, we had developed it strictly for on-premise installations. Since then we have transitioned from on-premise, to SaaS (cloud enabled), and now to cloud native.

Microservices architecture plays an important role in developing cloud-native applications. For example, our latest OneView release included animated display of call routing within a unified communication system. Implementing this feature involved quite a few moving parts and complex call routing logic. By implementing modules as loosely coupled microservices, we were able to manage the technical risks and complete the feature within the aggressive timeline.

Time for You to Begin Your Journey

As we come to a close in our first discussion, we hope by providing you background and context to cloud native, as well as detailing the ways in which we’ve already embarked on our journey, you’ll be encouraged to now begin your journey. If you are to go ahead and embark on it, it’s important you understand that designing cloud-native applications doesn’t happen overnight. It is rather a journey that requires thoughtful planning and organizational support. There are no hard or fast rules, but it is best to start small.

Don’t go anywhere as we still have a lot to unpack in this Strategy & Design Series. Earlier, we briefly defined the core components that make up cloud native, as well as the role microservices played in the implementation of our latest OneView feature. So, in our next discussion, we’ll be digging even deeper into these core components, starting with microservices. See you next time!

With over 240,000 sq/ft of space in their facility, Bullen employees are often on the move, not tethered to their desks – and Unify for GroupWise has been a big productivity enhancement for them.

>Read on

Cam Cole
8.14.13

This is a true example of what can be done with voice mail as a defense tool. The names in this story have been changed, but the story is real.

Once upon a time there was a hard working family man we will call “Bob”. Bob worked a blue collar job for a large firm for several years.  He was successful at this position, paid his dues in life, and was on good terms with most if not everyone he worked with.

One day a report was filed with HR about some alleged wrong doing; nothing criminal mind you but a definite black mark and possibly a firing offense for Bob.  Seemed a co-worker named “Nick”, had reported some alleged policy violations that made Bob, who also happened to be a friend of Nick’s, look like a major screw-up in the workplace.

Now several days later Nick felt horrible about filing this report, falsely accusing Bob of these violations.  Nick called Bob and left a voice mail begging for forgiveness. On the voice mail, Nick confessed that a senior supervisor, one of the very few people who did not like Bob, had threatened his job if he did not falsify the report.  As you can guess this voice message was very damaging evidence against the unscrupulous supervisor who had arranged the entire situation to eliminate Bob.

It’s unfortunate, but on occasion, people lie.  Or their memory does not match the facts. Sure, most people are good and try to do the right thing but sometimes they are misled, coerced and sometimes, just malicious. Being able to produce a voice mail record is a powerful asset.

It is not only litigators or criminal investigators who can use voice mails as evidence.  In this case, voice mail helped resolve an H.R. issue that would have turned into a legal issue, but voice mail can play an important proactive role in lots of areas: from customer service to emergency response.  The intention and tone of the message is not subject to interpretation like it can be in an email.  (There’s a reason why 911 recordings are played so often: they are compelling!)

Now you might be inclined to think “why would I want to save voice mail if it can be so damning?”  You do – for lots of reasons that actually protect your organization rather than harm it:

• Voice mail became a discoverable record in 2006.  If you are asked for it, you have to produce it.
• Technology has evolved so that the “difficulty in provision” argument is no longer an easy out for voice mail discovery.
• Avoid legal censure & penalties for failure to take reasonable steps to preserve.  Waiting until receipt of a subpoena can land you in a lot of expensive legal hot water.
• Ability to leverage the message & its meta-data to quickly know the facts of an allegation to head off potential problems early.
• Customer service issue tracking.
• H.R. support.
• Ensure regulatory compliance (as applicable).

Most organizations understand the logic of the need to archive email communications, yet too many are leaving themselves exposed on voice mail records.

Message Vault can quickly solve this issue.  It provides easy, flexible voice mail archiving for the latest Cisco phone platform.  It enables secure, accountable policy-driven record retention of voice mail, along with the ability to search, filter, restore and report on those message records.  It’s easy to implement and use, and as an added benefit for IT, it offers tremendous storage capacity savings and great administrative support tools to help manage their voice mail.

So be forewarned: What you say can and can be used against you – whether you like it or not!

>Learn more

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It’s up and live…the podcast of our recent interview with Telecom Reseller News, that is.

We spent a few minutes recently with Executive Editor Jeff Own talking about the need for voice mail archiving, and how Message Vault solves this common archiving gap.

>Access the podcast

Quick update from our testing & Q/A lab:

Unify 8.5 for GroupWise now supports Unity Connection 9.1 – the very latest release. We want to make sure that as new releases happen, our products are ready.

If you are running Unify for GroupWise now and would like the update patch that is free for all maintenance customers, please do not hesitate to contact Support to request it.

Donoma Unify for Notes is a critical productivity tool for Lawyer’s Professional Indemnity Company (LawPRO).  Having all their critical communications in one place keeps their employees connected and responsive to their clients, while making it very easy for IT to manage.

>Learn more about how LawPRO is enjoying the benefits

Our June update of Message Vault will add 3 great new features:

1. Customize hold length on specific messages. Want to vary retention length on specific messages?  Now you can with the click of a mouse.

2. Never miss records, even if systems go offline. If your systems go offline, Message Vault checks all possible locations for interim messages and archives them.

3. Easily move your archive location. If you want to re-locate your Message Vault archive data, it’s a very simple point and click process.

Ready to learn more? Contact us today!

Our team has been hard at work making our Unify 8.7 for Notes release even better with a number of great features geared specifically to help today’s busy professionals stay connected and agile with the convenience of one touch voicemail management.

Some of the highlights of this release include:

• Integration with Lotus Sametime – If you use Sametime, now you can get your voicemail notifications in Sametime as well as your Notes or iNotes client.
• More support for mobile devices – because we support Lotus Traveler, you can now connect your voicemail to your choice of smartphone: Blackberry, iPhone or Android.
• More call handling options – from the new “click to dial/redial” feature to the ability to redirect the playback of your message, we’ve made a number of enhancements to suit your preferences.
• Incredible speed and scalability – now up to 10,000 users per server.  High performance and less hardware expense.

>Learn more about the extended list of benefits of this release.

In some organizations, the benefits of tools to keep people more connected have been undervalued – often looked as being “toys”.  Now as more organizations are embracing more tools in a “social” and collaborative environment, the benefits are becoming increasingly clear, as underscored in this USA Today article on some of the IBM “Ready for Social Media” applications.  We are proud that our Unify for Lotus Notes is a part of this suite of IBM solutions.  Email is still our “go-to” app, and enabling automatic bi-directional synchronization with voicemail is an invaluable productivity boost.  Up to 10 hours per month! (Source: Radacati Group, 2004)

Check out the USA Today article