Project Challenges

As the shape and function of telephones has changed, telecommunications businesses have had to change with it. This is how Invoca started their path to becoming the leader in integrating human interaction with AI data collection and response.

While Invoca's approach to telecommunications was modern, after an acquisition, they were challenged with a data center needing to be maintained and substantial tech debt that needed to be addressed in order to achieve a low effort maintenance schedule. Of the around 300 hand-configured rack servers, over 200 had no automation, making the tasks of ongoing maintenance and management much more difficult and time consuming. Finding enough engineers that knew the hardware maintenance and networking expertise that data centers required compounded the challenges. And any outages that did end up occurring, despite all the maintenance investments, would cost time and money — as well as potentially harming Invoca customers' businesses.

With a system built for heavy traffic — representing tens of millions of dollars of revenue flowing across that platform with thousands of users, and thousands upon thousands of concurrent phone calls on a daily basis — it was clear that they couldn’t rely on the physical infrastructure indefinitely. But since Invoca’s platform uses custom, interlinked programs, they also couldn’t use a one-size-fits-all cloud migration approach. They needed a partner who understood the cloud and could find solutions to their unique challenges. This is what brought them to Google Cloud and our partner, Zencore.

Solution

When they started looking for vendors, Invoca already had a SaaS platform running on Google Cloud, but they still wanted to do their due diligence for this new project. And when they compared us against other cloud providers, they were impressed with what we had to offer.

As James Brown, Sr. Director, Infrastructure & Security at Invoca said, “From a hardware perspective, Google is just better, hands down. They have live migration built into it – which means if the underlying hardware for a VM is having an issue, they silently migrate your workloads behind the scenes to new hardware so there is zero interruption on your end – so we knew that meant we’d have far fewer, if not zero, downtime issues due to hardware.”

Another major differentiating factor was the migration speed each cloud provider offered. The other cloud provider’s partner they explored said that migration would take at least a year, while we said that we could complete their migration in three to six months. Considering they were already considering expanding their usage of Google Cloud for other uses, this made it clear that we were the provider they would work with.

During negotiations, we suggested that they work with our partner, Zencore. Invoca’s initial plan was to meet with the subject matter experts at Zencore to come up with a lift-and-shift migration plan, and when it was time to move, Invoca would shift the burden back into their own team. When they discovered the Zencore team’s technical expertise, however, Invoca decided to work with them throughout the process and pull them into future projects as well.

As Brown says, “We deal with telecom, so the idea that we’d be transporting this old technology with hardly any engineers left who do that was very nerve-wracking. The fact that Zencore were able to do this was very impressive.”