I have been in the telecommunications industry for 25 years. One of the most profound developments has been the miniaturization of telecom technology. In the 70’s a central office servicing 40,000 lines required a large building to house it and considerable power and cabling resources. In the 80’s things began to get smaller. The first long distance digital switch that I worked on, a Harris 20/20 was three feet deep and about 40 feet wide and could support 10,000 ports, and I thought that was small. Today, the Lucent Compact Switch or LCS that NICE CXone employs in its telecom network can support local and long distance features,. Depending on its configuration, it can handle tens of thousands of lines and is half the size of my refrigerator at home. When we connect T1’s to our network, they come in on optical carriers and connect directly to our LCS at the DS3 interface level. The footprint, both for space, power and cooling are a fraction of what they were even 10 years ago. I remember seeing a briefcase phone, and then later my first cell phone was a ‘brick’ and all it did was make calls. Now of course we have phones that are complete with the capabilities of a desktop computer, a camera and a phone.
At NICE CXone, the race ‘to get small’ is also underway. Thanks to multi-core machines and blade server technology, what used to fill a cabinet now sits in a chassis that fits in half a cabinet. Gigabytes of disk storage have become terabytes using half the space and finally, Fast-E Internet connections have become Gig-E. We are committed to employing the technologies that will keep NICE CXone in the lead and able to provide our customers with the services and the foot print they need in today’s faster, smaller world.
