Dialpad Raises the Bar in Cloud Communications With 100% Uptime Guarantee

California-based Dialpad is kicking things up a notch with 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA), underscoring how availability counts more than all the extra features. Toolbox spoke to Dialpad’s VP of Engineering to understand why this is a ringing endorsement for the cloud communications vendor.

Inarguably, 2020 turned out to be a year of video conferencing — Zoom and Microsoft Teams emerged as the key winners amid the pandemic-driven move to long-term WFH and recorded never-before-seen levels of usage. Over the past year, collaboration solutions grew at breakneck speed but their data centers and technical infrastructure failed to keep pace with the evolving times. For instance, Zoom Meetings and Webinars suffered a partial outage on August 24, 2020 affecting users in the U.S. and U.K. More recently, Salesforce-owned Slack was hit by a downtime on the first working day of the new year, triggering a meme fest on Twitter.

Now, as the whole world has moved to video communication and strives to become much more digital, ensuring 100% uptime has become the key goal for providing seamless communications. Newly-minted unicorn Dialpad, one of the leading cloud communications platforms for AI-powered conferencing and contact centers is touting a ‘100% uptime service level agreement (SLA) for customersOpens a new window ‘ — a ringing endorsement for their UCaaS and CCaaS solutions.

In a world of unexpected outages, Dialpad’s new messaging is dubbed as a bold move by industry analysts.  TalkingPointz’s Principal Analyst Dave Michels tweetedOpens a new window that “100% uptime is a tough nut to crack, Dialpad is saying it’s their problem not yours.”

It’s not just “Uptime” either…its full blown “Availability”. Competitors use “uptime” but give themselves service and maintenance windows to take down the service for upgrades (*relic of being on a legacy tech stack)…Dialpad never has service or maintenance windows either;)

— Craig Walker (@cwalker123) January 12, 2021Opens a new window

To understand the key differentiator, Toolbox spoke to Corey BurkeOpens a new window , VP of Engineering at Dialpad, who revealed how the cloud communication service provider is finding its path to resiliency and uptime. The answer lies in the split cloud architecture, which is central to uptime SLA.

Meetings have become a fact of our modern business environment. In fact, video conferencing is where information exchange takes place. But even an hour of downtime can stall critical business processes and chip away at the top lines. And as Burke puts it, there’s never a good time for a business phone service to be unavailable, and we have never had scheduled maintenance windows.

“Dialpad has long been working toward a 100% uptime guarantee for our customers. It has been years of dedication to stability (testing, monitoring, redundancy, deep industry partnerships, disaster planning, etc.) that has enabled us to get to this point,” he said.

Ensuring Reliable Connectivity and Availability

Burke divulged some of the techniques the California-based company leverages to avoid downtime. Here’s the key — they do it by rolling deployments with a multi-tenant architecture and sufficient geo-located redundancy, so they never need to take a customer down for maintenance. Dialpad also has a 24/7 around-the-world Network Operations Center (NOC), retains physical ownership of half its infrastructure, and maintains strong local carrier partnerships. Roughly half of the infrastructure is physically owned by Dialpad and located in its data centers and the other half is in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Burke terms this as a ‘Split-Cloud architecture.’

Dialpad’s multi-tenant allows it to host most of the business logic in Google Cloud while doing media handling in its data centers that are strategically positioned around the globe. “This gives us deep control over the latency and reliability of the networks and machines that our call media traverses while still taking advantage of common cloud infrastructure for the often-evolving portions of our service,” he added.

See Also: Why RingCentral Is Ahead of the Pack in the UCaaS Market

The cloud communications service provider has factored in external threats and is confident that its architecture can effectively prevent attacks ranging from denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) to intrusions.

So, if 100% uptime is the ‘X factor’ in the cloud communications race, why aren’t more competitors offering the same kind of SLAs? Well, North Carolina-based Avaya offers 100% uptime. Meanwhile, RingCentralOpens a new window , VonageOpens a new window , and NextivaOpens a new window are sticking to the 99.999% uptime tagline.

The VC-backed call center platform was founded in 2011 by Craig WalkerOpens a new window , who pioneered Yahoo! Voice and Google Voice. The company has become a force in the crowded unified communications and contact center ecosystem and has plans to overtake the established rivals. In October 2020, Dialpad snagged a $100 million Series E investmentOpens a new window , shooting up its valuation to $1.2 billion. It’s changed messaging could usher in a phase when clients start demanding 100% uptime SLA.

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