Feature Fridays Episode 54 – Chatbot Implementation in VMware Cloud Director

Feature Fridays Episode 54 – Chatbot Implementation in VMware Cloud Director

Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the global market for Chatbots estimated at US$376.4 Million in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$1.4 Billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 21.2% over the analysis period 2020-2027 (Research and Markets, 2021). Chatbots are increasingly popular amongst Cloud Providers and all industries to offset support costs and deliver instant service to customers. 

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This episode is a rare occurrence for the Feature Friday community as we bring together a stellar line-up of speakers to discuss an ingenious chatbot solution for VMware Cloud Director (VCD).  In this session, I’m joined by Joerg Lew (Technical Product Manager), Dimtry Glebov (Solution Architect), Milko Slavov (Engineering) and Eugene Burhovetsky (Senior engineer of Operation Cloud Department) from Rostelecom, Russia’s leading telecommunications provider. 

Rostelecom are successfully operating a chatbot facility within VMware Cloud Director (10.x) as their first line ‘conversation agent’ to offer on-demand support to their VCD tenants. Currently, the chatbot entity resides seamlessly within the VCD UI and can also be created and distributed as a regular VCD plugin. From an interoperability perspective the chatbot integrates with Rostelecom’s internal ecosystem, knowledge base library, works in a browser and, also, as a telegram bot. The chatbot application is orchestrated by Rostelecom with an AI bot supplied by a third-party company: ‘Autofaq’ using the VCD extensibility features. 

The chatbot plugin can be published to all or select tenants. This feature comes in handy if the service providers are looking to monetization off the chatbots. Ultimately, the chatbot offers significant benefits to Cloud Providers and their clients by reducing wait time, support overhead costs and facilitating quicker issue resolution, increasing service confidence. 

Watch the full video to learn how VCD extensibility APIs and plugins can be implemented and scaled up to meet new business requirements.