Marco Rullo - 22 April, 2020 - 6 ’ read

Growing towards performance, scalability, and security.

Call Analytics, Call Recording Reports, covid-19, Database Improvement, Owasp top 10, Secure Software, Smart Working, WSTG

The importance of moving forward.

Despite the difficulties related to the global epidemic from COVID-19 that we are going through, Imagicle has continued to be fully operational. Indeed, thanks to smart working, we have completed a new release of ApplicationSuite, Spring 2020, particularly rich in news.

To learn about the Imagicle offers for smart working, such as 60-days free trial of the apps, click here.

In the previous posts, we told you about some of the most important achievements: the full-text contact search capabilities across Imagicle apps, the new Call Recording reporting system, an even stronger security system, and the optimization of the Call Analytics tool.

But what I want to tell you today is some background of how we conceived such improvements, in order to make you fully realize the advantages that these innovations will bring in your daily work.

Today more than ever, there’s a need not to give up, to be projected into the future, and to offer users tools that allow everyone to continue their work as efficiently and simply as possible, in order to start again even more competent as soon as possible once things return to normal.

The pillars of Imagicle innovation.

As usual, Spring 2020 brings new rich features, such as the reports for the Call Recording app that will help you keep your recordings under control. This time, however, we wanted something more: we wanted to bring an improvement in the user experience that would be disruptive for as many customers as possible.

It’s ambitious, I know. But the challenges are just what we are looking for: what allows us to test ourselves and evolve.

Basically, we decided to focus on two pillars, Performance and Security, that together with Leadership and Innovation, make up Imagicle Product Strategy for 2020 and beyond.

Regarding the first two, we began a sort of revolution starting from two applications in particular, the Call Analytics and Contact Manager. Why?

Because more than 60% of our active customers own at least one of them, and 25% have both. Not to mention that users of other applications, such as the Attendant Console, will also benefit from the improvements on Contact Manager. Hence, we saw an excellent opportunity to make a positive impact on many customers.

Contact Manager: searches at the speed of light!

Let’s get straight to the point: the searches for colleagues and contacts in Spring 2020 will have nothing short of exceptional performances!

It doesn’t matter how many contacts you want to store in your directory (and we estimate that Spring 2020 will allow you to manage up to 2 million contacts with the Microsoft SQL Server Express database): if you perform a targeted search, for example by “name and surname“, “company surname” or “surname department”, you will find the results in the blink of an eye, spending 100 times less time than before!

And if you’re wondering which search interface you can use it on, the answer is all of them! You can search for contacts from the gadget for Cisco Jabber and for Cisco Finesse, from the web, from the mobile app, from the Cisco IP Phone or from the Attendant Console. Contact Manager will surprise you in any case.

…and, about the Attendant Console, want to play a game?

There is a little news in Spring’20, hope you noticed it. It’s a new button, very easy to

reach, which will bring up the Unified Search popup that we introduced in Winter 2020: a single text box to search for colleagues, favorites, contacts and, thanks to Spring ’20, at the speed of light!

Call Analytics: smarter database, faster reports.

Again, this has not been a small change. We have literally revolutionized the core of our Call Analytics database.

In fact, starting from Spring 2020 it will be even:

smarter: the new data modeling has reduced the size of the database by 67%! Until Winter ’20, 1M of calls took up to 2.5GB. From Spring 2020, it will take around 800MB at the most;
faster: running a report for a given period of time will take half the average time and, in some cases, will be reduced by 80%!
easier: what do you need to do to take advantage of all these improvements? Well, nothing sophisticated. Just upgrade to Spring’20 and the Suite will take care of everything.

Let me give you some concrete examples of what all this means.

all customers, from the smallest to the largest, will be able to extract reports much faster;
we estimate, for example, that 15″ are enough to extract a report on two years of calls for a customer with 1000 users. Or a report on ten months of data for a customer with 2500 users. Of course, it is possible to extend the time interval by waiting a little longer or scheduling the report;
the Microsoft SQL Server Express database engine, shipped with the Suite with no additional cost, can store up to 3 times the number calls previously managed;
SQL Server Express can handle up to 2 years of 5000 users calls (or 1 year of 10,000 users calls)*;
it will be necessary to resort to a commercial edition of Microsoft SQL Server only for customers with greater needs for data retention;
a smaller database means lower hardware requirements, which is particularly important in the case of a commercial SQL Server outside the Suite (and perhaps also shared with other applications);
Finally, a smaller database also means simpler maintenance operations; for example, periodic backups are now faster and more compact.

*contact us for exact sizing.

I recommend you to learn more about the challenges we faced and the sophisticated engineering work dedicated to our longest and best-selling application ever, in this article by Italo and Luca, where you will find out how the optimization of the solution will translate into an increase in performance.

The leading role of cybersecurity.

But the topic that, at this moment, I am particularly interested in is (cyber) security.

Of course, it goes without saying that cybersecurity has become a crucial aspect for any company that uses software solutions today. Therefore, what I want you to think about is a more subtle and, at the same time, more strategic aspect: the importance of reliability (in terms of cybersecurity) not only of a software product but of the company that develops it.

Today it’s not enough to adopt the best security practices within your company: we must also look at the level of security offered by each software solution we use. In fact, when we adopt a third party software solution, the manufacturer becomes our partner and, whether we like it or not, it contributes to our ability to achieve a certain level of security.

Not surprisingly, according to a recent Gartner report, it is estimated that a company’s cybersecurity posture will soon become just as important as its credit rating.

What does all this have to do with us?

We are aware that, when our UCX Suite becomes part of your software systems and networks, we become your partner, and we feel responsible for your security. And, as we never tire of saying, our mission is to be the partner you can count on, not only in your daily work thanks to the features offered by the Suite, but also in terms of your safety.

We have started the path to implement a Secure Software Development Lifecycle that aims to change the mindset with which we conceive and design software, giving cybersecurity a leading role in every phase of development.

Well, Spring 2020 is the first milestone of this path, so we started by identifying and solving the pre-existing vulnerabilities to the Suite’s web portal.

But there is more. We have decided to take on a new commitment to our customers and partners: from now on, if we identify a new vulnerability belonging to the OWASP Top 10, you can count on a software update of the latest release published. As usual, there will be no additional costs: from today on, your ImagicleCare contract comes with safer software!

Cybersecurity. Not only on the web.

Cybersecurity does not only mean protection from attacks that exploit software vulnerabilities: it also means protecting communications that deal with sensitive information. In this regard, Spring’20 includes two important features that I want to tell you about.

As Call Recording already did, now the Advanced Queuing and Auto Attendant solutions also support secure VoIP protocols SIPs and SRTP: from today on, it is possible to protect the direct calls to your IVR services, your queues and your operators from indiscreet (and malicious) ears; such functionality may be particularly important for environments with the highest safety requirements, such as HCS-G.

Finally, one last precaution: we have also decided to make the communication between the UCX Suite and the Microsoft Active Directory secure. From Spring 20, both users synchronization from AD and users authentication on AD will employ secure communication by default, not only for new configurations but also for existing ones.

During the update, the UCX Suite will verify the possibility of using a secure channel with the AD domain and, if possible, automatically update the configurations. We wanted to make sure that your users’ credentials no longer passed through the network in a clear format and that Spring 2020 was prepared for this Microsoft Security Update, which encourages the exclusive use of secure connections to Active Directory servers.

I hope I have made the idea of the commitment we have made in recent months and our enthusiasm for making Imagicle UCX Suite once again smarter, faster, easier … and, from today, safer!