No Blackberry-like outages for DiVitas users

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

One key benefit with the DiVitas solution is that the mobile-communications infrastructure is under enterprise control. This doesn’t just mean companies maintain their own control over phone usage (call costs) and policy compliance. It means DiVitas users need not worry about getting hit by a major outage caused by, and fixed by, a third-party. This was the case earlier this month when RIM’s Blackberry users lost service for three hours.

According to a NetworkWorld article, RIM blamed upgrades to its security infrastructure as the cause of a service outage for its BlackBerry devices. About a week later, Blackberry users were out of luck (and service) again when another outage occurred.

This type of outage happened because RIM has a single point of failure, and it failed. Enterprises have BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) resident in their networks and it hot-links back to the RIM Network Operations Center (NOC). When RIM’s NOC failed, Blackberry users found themselves without email service.

This kind of outage won’t happen to DiVitas users because the DiVitas architecture puts control in the hands of the enterprise. The risk of outage is on company-by-company basis, and therefore it is much lower.

Also, if there is an outage, it’s not an all-or-nothing scenario. Let’s say a DiVitas user’s network center goes down and the company loses DiVitas server functionality or WiFi access. Users still have the cellular component of their phones to rely on. Of course all of the DiVitas features, such as Caller ID, presence, and IM won’t be available. But then again users won’t be instantly and totally cut off from all communication. They can still make calls and use email via the cellular network. In such scenarios, inbound calls from the PBX will be routed to voicemail and can be picked up over the cellular network.

For a DiVitas user to lose email access, the company’s email server would have to go down. The email server is a second point of failure, and the chances that the network center and the email server will simultaneously fail are pretty low.

From a reliability standpoint, having control over your own communications infrastructure is a far better choice than depending on a third-party.