November 20th, 2006
If Vonage handles this right, their customer service will improve
Vonage announced a move this morning that if they handle it right- and that's one big honkin' IF- their customer service could improve several fold.
I'm talking about a new alliance with open-source relational database management system vendor EnterpriseDB. Vonage has already moved part of its trouble-ticket system for customer support from mySQL to EnterpriseDB Advanced Server.
Add to that, Vonage Network president Tim Smith tells Computerworld's Eric Lai that Vonage is thinking "fairly seriously" at moving its billing records database from Oracle 9 to EnterpriseDB.
Smith says that EnterpriseDB's reasonable price levels and scalability are why Vonage is seriously looking to move its billing database to EnterpriseDB. This database stores billions (tempted to type "billions and billions"-a la Carl Sagan) of call data records that are accessed frequently by Vonage support.
"There are lots of small records," he said. "We're not too worried about the table size; we just want to be comfortable that we can hammer it [EnterpriseDB] with a load."
So let's see if Vonage and EnterpriseDB are up to the task.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
