Well, I’m never disappointed when I assume O’Grady’s Law over Murphy’s Law. You know what THAT is, right? Murphy’s Law = anything that CAN go wrong, WILL go wrong. O-Grady’s Law = Murphy was an optimist.
This seems to be the rule of thumb when it comes to IT development. We had thought we’d finish this little upgrade to GroupCaller over the weekend. Nope. Biggest problem is that we have to work with programmers from 2 other companies who don’t seem NEARLY as motivated to get the job done as we are. Getting them to communicate with each other has been a monumental task. So bad, in fact, that we went with a competing vendor today and doubt if we’ll use the one we had previously chosen. It’s already beginning to look like this change must have been the “right” thing to do all along, since these new people are VERY responsive in the technical department (24x7x365).
So the bottom line is this: Hardware upgrade 90% complete. Software Upgrade… ummmm… maybe 20% complete. This upgrade is currently my highest priority. Regardless of our internal frustrations, I’m confident we’ll be up and operational with GroupCaller again within the next several days, hopefully no more than 7 to 10 days.
I thought you might like to actually SEE the GroupCaller set up. Here I am in the national control center. Yep. That’s the office in my HOME… now with 14 networked servers and the capability of making about 15,000 to 20,000 calls a day to start, with the improvements we’re working on right now. But with an upgrade to our broadband capacity, we should be able to run 60 to 100 phone lines within 30 to 60 days of re-starting the GroupCaller. That could give us an outbound dialing capacity of up to 100,000 phone calls a day! And the real kicker? I could get enough bandwidth right here in my home to run up to about 500 lines before moving the equipment to a different location, which means we could ultimately make about 450,000 calls a day! And that’s in the NEAR future.
But even THAT’S not enough! Nope. We designed this system to make millions of calls each day delivering messages for tens or hundreds of thousands of Clients at a time. For the GroupCaller to be truly competitive, especially during the political season, we must have a capacity of several million calls per day if we’re going to attract the national political campaigns. We’re working feverishly to perfect this system for the upcoming Presidential election season. “Robo-calling” is BIG BUSINESS and we intend to get our fair share of the robocalls in next year’s election season.
There’s so much to report on. We’re finally seeing a little “real” growth despite the fact that we’re still low on staffing. We’ll be re-hiring and hiring new engineers after we pass the first AMG goal of 400 active AMG Members. I’ll be writing more about our growth and progress later this week.
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