Synchrony Architecture and Technology

Synchrony relies on the inherent strength and flexibility of its multi-tenant, web-based architecture to deliver a customer experience management solution that meets the demands of today?s highly competitive and strategic contact centers. Several factors differentiate Synchrony?s architecture and provide a framework for delivering unique, leading-edge functionality:

• Web Native
  The Synchrony Desktop and Synchrony Central are 100% web-native providing maximum flexibility and accessibility to the most frequently used tools in the contact center. With web-based access, software does not need to be installed and maintained on each user desktop. It also enables the Agent Anywhere (remote agent) capability where users can log in to the system from anywhere they can access a web browser. The internet?s flexibility also allows several components of Synchrony?s application to be readily available to end-customers in a self-service environment.
• Multi-tenant
  To deliver software via the internet or an organization?s internal intranet, the application and data model must securely support multiple clients or departments, with multiple groups and campaigns, accessing a single application instance. This architecture provides valuable infrastructure and operational savings by enabling clients to span the Synchrony application across their enterprises without additional technology. Synchrony?s shared deployment platform supports multiple business units, suppliers and partners to truly generate a single, unified view of the customer. This flexible model enables rapid deployment, customized functionality, and improved scalability.
• Web services adapter
  Synchrony uses Web services to expose integration to external systems. This enables a contact center to access and leverage data that resides in existing front-end and back-end systems versus replacing or integrating systems. It also eliminates the integration challenges of data replication and associated data currency and accuracy issues.
• Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and PSTN
  Synchrony leverages high-bandwidth data connectivity to link disparate locations and eliminate the need for site-specific servers and phone lines. This expands Synchrony's "agent anywhere" capability, enabling remote or at-home agents to use VoIP or PSTN for normal operations as well as temporary relocations caused by emergencies. For a growing number of organizations, VoIP is a cost-effective alternative or addition to the traditional public switch telephone network (PSTN).
• OpenTel API
  Synchrony includes an open interface enabling organizations to develop their own custom OpenTEL telephony drivers. The API exposes access to Synchrony?s Universal Queue, allowing custom drivers to bridge the gap between the Synchrony server and VoIP telephony solutions, legacy or analog PBX?s, for example. The OpenTel API delivers ultimate flexibility and control for developing custom interfaces, resulting in cost savings and the ability to adapt and take advantage of the newest enhancements and developments in the industry.

"Enterprise-Class" Functionality and Performance
By design, Synchrony addresses single, multi- and cross-enterprise deployment as a fundamentally distinct discipline. The architecture was uniquely defined to meet the following requirements of an "enterprise-class" solution:

• Mission-Critical Capabilities
  • Reliability and stability ensure support for daily operations.
  • Product scalability is crucial as the number of users increases.
• Rapid Deployment ? Allows businesses to reap benefits in less than 30 days.
• Extensibility and Seamless Integration Architecture ? Every business has unique processes, applications and systems. Synchrony?s architecture enables businesses to quickly extend and integrate the application across existing and future business structures.

Core Architecture

Synchrony?s solution is built on a robust and efficient platform leveraging standardized, modular components and, through the internet, provides a complete set of services to those components.

Enterprise JavaBeans? and J2EE?
Synchrony?s core architectural foundation is based completely on Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) with adherence to J2EE standards. Leveraging the EJB model facilitates a true Distributed Component solution. Distributed Components or Objects are software components designed to work together at run-time without prior linking or pre-compilation as a group. Regardless of the source language or network used, the objects interoperate through the messages passed between them, providing structural flexibility.

Enterprise JavaBeans?, or EJB, components give web pages and other applications interactive capabilities. Additionally, via the EJB model, an enterprise can control changes at the server level rather than updating each individual client computer whenever a new program component is changed or added. This is critical for Synchrony?s multi-enterprise deployment process as it enables us to reuse code, easily identify code errors, isolate issues and add components quickly.

Internet-Native Architecture
Unlike several internet-based architectures that essentially offer an HTML-based solution around traditional client/server architecture, Synchrony?s desktop and backend integration modules are 100 percent internet-native. As such, Synchrony supports the following:

• Optimized thin-client deployment with complete internet delivery through a browser-based application. Upgrades are transparent, as no reloading of software needs to occur on the user desktops.
• A central application cluster, available only through HTTP/HTTPS, houses the distributed business components that are accessible via a traditional web browser and web services.
• Enhanced interoperability across the enterprise utilizing Web Service Integration. This internet-native architecture allows organizations to streamline existing processes and minimize costs by taking advantage of previous system investments.

N-Tiered Application Architecture
Synchrony, built upon an increasingly popular three-tier architectural style, facilitates an n-tiered architecture that allows businesses to support many concurrent users, meet uptime requirements and keep installation, upgrade and integration costs low. The n-tiered framework distributes the processing load across all tiers, segments functionality to appropriate layers and overlays common interfaces across the entire application.

Synchrony?s n-tiered architecture is designed as a network-optimized variant of the traditional Model View Controller (MVC) paradigm. In this distributed MVC paradigm, the visual user interface, the modeling of the external world and the internet-based user delivery are explicitly separated and handled by three or more independent tiers, each specialized for its task, including:

• The Presentation Tier adopts the responsibilities for the view and manages the graphical and/or textual output to the Synchrony desktop, within a browser, over an HTTP protocol.
• The Controller is a logical set of entities within the Web Deployment Tier and the Multi-Channel Communications Tier, which intermediates data and business logic from the remote user and optimizes these interactions for internet delivery.
• The Business Logic, Data and Analytics Tiers manage the behavior and data of the application domain, respond to requests for information about its state (usually from the view) and apply instructions to change state and content (usually from the controller).

Security
Security is intrinsic to all tiers within the Synchrony solution and is implemented as a logical set of services within the Synchrony multi-tenant kernel. The various services provide the following levels of security:

• Access-level ? Various authentication and authorization policies for access control.
• Wire-level ? Data encryption for communications over the Internet.
• Application-level ? Business objects can only be accessed utilizing a "smart-security" mechanism where a series of Access Control Lists (ACL) are configured on a per-campaign, per-tenant basis to ensure that the "sandbox" environment within a multi-tenant environment is enforced.
• Data-level ? Each table and component of the data model schema has the notion of users, groups and security levels associated with it. The database itself is recommended to be set up in a "hardened" format wherein no other application can access that database machine other than the application and systems management services.

The security services support the propagation of key security information from client browser to the application servers so the information can be used for authentication, authorization and audit trail/logging. In addition to its embedded security features, Synchrony provides a complete SSL implementation. SSL or Secure Sockets Layer is a secure communication protocol that ties encryption, authentication and key exchange together into one communication layer that sits on top of a standard TCP/IP communication. The combination of these features provides robust, system-wide security allowing clients to focus on the application and its uses rather than the security infrastructure.

Integration Framework
A core architectural philosophy of the Synchrony solution is to facilitate a deep legacy/enterprise integration capability that allows organizations to leverage existing application and system investments. The focus of the integration framework is to enable an organization to span multiple systems in order to see a single view of a customer. Providing this single customer view across their enterprise helps in effectively managing and reporting against any interaction, transaction or transaction exceptions while meeting the following goals:

• Enable customers and partners to integrate Synchrony with existing IT infrastructure without expensive and time-consuming systems integration work.
• Facilitate secure and seamless integration across firewalls.
• Provide minimal impact on customer and/or partner systems.
• Leverage the EAI/B2B integration tools that are available in the market.

Synchrony?s modular integration architecture allows an externalized Applications Programming Interface (API) to integrate with the Synchrony application through the Synchrony Web Service Adapter (WSA). Synchrony's Web Services Adapter (WSA) provides access to Synchrony's API over the internet. These API or web services are based on standards (HTTP, XML, SOAP) and are available remotely through a company's firewall. They provide a powerful set of functions to facilitate integrations between Synchrony and other Enterprise Software Systems. WSA provides flexibility in implementing integrations ranging from:

• Simple system to system real-time or batch exchange of data, to
• Sophisticated event driven business processes.

These services provide out-of-the-box access to Synchrony data structures in the form of Java objects available over the internet