Flysip Software recognizes the fact that your business depends on the continuous operation of your VoIP network. We designed our Softswitch to be extremely robust and reliable. Our customers benefit from the reliability they come to expect from Flysip but like anything else our Softswitch will not operate non-stop or without maintenance. There have been some cases when customers confidence in our Softswitch leads them to negligently operate heavily loaded Softswitches without renewing their support and maintenance agreements for extended periods of time.
Taking Flysip’s reliability and robustness into consideration, it is ALWAYS good business practice to keep support and maintenance agreements up to date so that you can feel safe with a 24/7 support and with a possibility to get the latest improvements and fixes in time.
1. Outage may happen
Despite all the advances in technology and built-in redundancies at many levels, hardware is not 100% reliable. Any piece of COTS (commercial off-the shelf equipment) has a certain MTBF (mean time between failures); so, sooner or later maintenance, repair or migration will be necessary. Flysip’s support team has extensive technical knowledge, tools and experience to deal with a complicated technical issues quickly and efficiently as when they arise. With a valid support agreement and maintenance contract, you will get an immediate assistance to perform an initial diagnosis and instructions your operations team can act on to manage the issues.
2. Security is important
Voice traffic costs money and as such, it is an asset that can attract fraud and theft especially when unsecured. We take security very seriously and our software has many levels of defense to protect your assets from any such adversaries. No defense is 100% bullet-proof. Unforeseen bugs and vulnerabilities will be discovered by our Quality Assurance and Support Engineers, Customers, and by the wider Open Source communities. These vulnerabilities may impact our own software or third party packages used to drive your system. On average each version of Flysip’s Softswitch release receives 5 to 15 security updates during its life cycle. Our security measures include notifying our customers in a at timely manner and providing a fix or a workaround. If you do not have an ongoing maintenance contract you remove are keeping your system from the security loop and potentially put your business at great financial risk.
3. Our Support Desk is 24/7. Our head office is not.
Flysip Software does its best to accommodate customers in different time zones and countries; however, unlike our customer support desk which operates 24/7/365, our head office is located in a single time zone (Pacific Standard Time) and is subject to regular working hours (7am - 3pm, Mon-Fri) as well as national and regional holidays. Any emergency that may happen to your unsupported system outside head office hours would be a subject to additional delay. In a worst case scenario, relying on the business team at head office to “back-date” payments or find solutions on your behalf can lead to waits of several calendar days before the support and maintenance contact can be reinstated or the technical team can get involved.
4. Limited number of supported Flysip Software versions
Flysip’s Software supports a limited number of the released versions. Support is limited to the 3 most recent, major versions (e.g v.5.0, v.5.1, v.5.2). After every new release, Flysip Software stops supporting the oldest supported version (e.g v4.5 that was wrapped up after the release of v5.2).
When new release announcements are published or emailed, customers with a valid support agreement can request to be updated from their oldest supported version to any of the latest supported versions (for free). For customers with valid support agreements, the free upgrade to the latest supported versions is available until the end of the date that is announced; this is an important step to secure a pre-ordered support.
Flysip will support all systems with pre-ordered support within the grace period (between announcement and actual end of support for the version). After the end of the grace period, the support department would start forwarding customer's requests to the sales department (even if support for the customer's system is still valid) additionally, the update of the system would be considered a fee-based request.
It is not possible to maintain all released versions. Thus, Flysip strongly recommends updating systems to the latest version after the new release announcement.
Customers who do not renew support on time and use an outdated version of the Flysip Softswitch may face an additional charge to update their systems even if support is renewed. In light of the various benefits of renewing your support agreement and updating your systems, Flysip Software highly recommends that you do so.
