Clarify Infrastructure Upgrades Continue to Grow in Popularity
It’s only natural that legacy Clarify deployments are often supported by outdated or soon to be outdated versions of operating systems and databases. More and more we’re contacted by clients exhibiting a slight tone of panic in their voices because the database and/or operating system their Clarify CRM software is residing on is soon to be unsupported, leaving them with more questions than answers. Will our customizations break? Will our event rules still fire properly? Will our Outlook version interact properly with legacy Clarify tools after an upgrade? What the heck are we going to do if something mission critical breaks? What if our auto-generated customer emails cease to work? Can you even imagine the increased workload to our support center staff if they have to individually email a follow up to each customer? Have we waited too long and we’re simply going to have fly blind, unsupported until we one day actually migrate from Clarify? I’m not particularly looking forward to yearly reviews should I be held responsible if something breaks on an unsupported mission critical application on my watch.
For these reasons and others, many clients had plans to migrate off old versions of Clarify/Amdocs many years ago. It’s one of the reasons they stopped upgrading Clarify versions long ago. Many of them even tried to, starting the arduous process of individually listing out their complex requirements stemming from many years of honing their support center processes and workflows. Soon they would be polishing those new, shiny Clarify replacement CRMs. Unfortunately for many, it wasn’t to be. Whether budgets became tight at an inopportune time or perhaps clients just found that mimicking those highly customized systems wasn’t as feasible as slick sales teams promised they would be. The data migration, the training of sometimes hundreds of users on a new front end client, the ever growing professional services bills to scope the old and customize the new, the added workload to existing internal technical staff that couldn’t afford to bring in a battalion of consults became overwhelming. Projects were often scrapped. Some were finally implemented, however much more painfully and over budget than originally anticipated.
The good news for folks in this or similar situations is that when done properly by experienced engineers, old and even really old versions of Clarify running on significantly outdated infrastructure typically perform exactly the same as they did when the underlying layers of infrastructure are upgraded to current versions. Not only does Dovetail bring that necessary experience to Clarify infrastructure upgrades, we close the loop by providing plug and play replacement tools like Dovetail Rule Manager and Dovetail Schema Editor that are certified on the most current operating systems and databases, unlike their predecessors. Since schema changes can be dicey on the old Clarify tools and Rule Manager in particular can be “buggy”, we typically leave customers not only as good as before, but better than before. By knowing the hotspots from performing these projects for many years with multiple clients (including our own Clarify environment) typically at the enterprise level, we bring proven experience to successful management and deployment of these upgrade projects. We are yet to encounter customer customizations or integrations we don’t have an answer for at an extreme fraction of the cost and effort of a new CRM replacement project.
If you find yourself snacking on your fingernails, pondering what to do about a rapidly aging underlying infrastructure that your important legacy Clarify/Amdocs deployment resides on, give us a call. Clarify/Amdocs infrastructure upgrade projects are one of our more popular services based on the nature of aging platforms and our unique expertise and product offering in this area.
