By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering


It's Tuesday night after the Wisconsin primaries last week. After hours. My cellphone rings. I answer and I hear a welcome chime and then a prompt. "Jaduka after-hours support. Press one to join a critical support conference. Press two to reject." I press one. And the Jaduka after-hours support system bridges me into an a conference call. The conference call started automatically just seconds ago.

I wait for a minute and the different members of our on-call support staff join the conference call one after the other. What triggered the conference call? Turns out traffic peaked on the network at exactly 8:12 pm. On a Tuesday? Tuesday night's an unusual time for a spike in traffic on any phone network. But then one of the on-call engineers speaks up. "They just announced that Wisconsin went to Obama. By double-digits."

Real-world events -- like New Year's Eve, American Idol, and, apparently, the Wisconsin primary process -- can generate lots of phone calls. If you run part of the phone network this is something you need to watch out for. A sudden spike in traffic can mean sudden strain on your network when you're talking about thousands of calls. Which is what we saw last week on Tuesday night. Traffic dropped off a minute later and we finished the conference call and went back to our evenings.

Critical Support Conferencing (or CSC) dialed us all automatically and we were able to meet in seconds. It's a neat system. It helps us manage our network. And it's fast.

So how does CSC work?

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The answer lies in the Jaduka APIs. We have a bunch of APIs (or application programming interfaces) at Jaduka. You can check out the public API at the Devzone. And we have an even higher-octane API for our enterprise partners. And then we have dozens of other APIs that we use for all sorts of stuff internally. Our internal APIs aren't quite ready for public release. But we use them all the time. To do stuff like start conference calls.

The Jaduka Conference API -- which is internal only right now -- lets our own developers start and stop conference calls. With a single line of code. It's got room for several dozen people per call. And it's perfect for getting a bunch of people on the phone at one time automatically.

On Tuesday night our database monitoring system noticed unusually high levels of activity for that time of week and triggered one of our maintenance scripts. The maintenance script looked up cellphone numbers for all six members of the support team and then dialed all of us. Everyone pressed "1" to join and within seconds we were all working together. Working together in one "place". One very virtual place.

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Critical support conferencing helps explain what we mean when we talk about communications-enabled business processes or CEBPs. CEBPs are just plain old business processes where it makes sense to automate communication. Getting staff on the phone to look at a potential problem is a good example. Plain old business process where we can automate communication.

CSC isn't yet a Jaduka enterprise service ... at least not yet. But interest is building. And it looks like we may do a test flight of enterprise CSC deployments soon. Stay tuned soon for more enterprise collaboration ...