Case Study 2: Rebuild Infrastructure and Provide New Services

Overview:

The world of telecommunications is rapidly evolving and modern technologies play a crucial role in its evolution.  If you’re a service provider who hasn’t updated their equipment you may find that your current equipment doesn’t have the some of the capabilities that your competitors have leading to lost opportunities and revenue! Or you might find that you have most of what you need but are looking to add a specific new feature or service.  If your existing platform doesn’t allow customization you might have to wait for the supplier to provide such a feature or pay them exorbitant fees to create the feature specifically for you.

Our customer, a service provider that has been in the business of providing equipment (phones, modems, etc.) and call center services (for purposes of captioning calls) to the hearing-impaired community for many years found themselves in a position where both of these conditions existed.  They were planning to migrate from proprietary messaging technologies to a more modern SIP based infrastructure. They needed someone to help rebuild their network using SIP and also to provide the ability to interwork with their existing systems and call centers to provide captioning services for the hearing-impaired community.  They also needed help to update their existing service to work in the world of SIP including adding new capabilities that the previous technologies could not deliver.  The customer had to decide if they wanted to build a custom solution, buy an overpriced option from “Big Telecom,” or implement a unique solution based upon the Sky-Networks platform. Because of the unique technical requirements and precise budget requirements, the service provider selected the unique solution from Sky-Networks.

System Requirements:

1. An ability to process a large number of calls.
2. Capable of handling hundreds of thousands of customers.
3. An ability to start small to prove viability and then grow.
4. An ability to provide redundancy and resiliency so the system would achieve 999% availability.
5. An ability to interface with their call
   1. This involved splitting the audio session so that the call agent can hear both sides of the conversation but cannot be heard.
6. An ability to handle terminating the call to multiple end devices simultaneously and for any or all of them to be answered.
7. An ability to be able to switch devices mid call and resume where they left
8. An ability for endpoint devices to cross network boundaries when mobile including transitioning from Wi-Fi to mobile and the reverse.
9. An ability to mix audio along with captions and direct it at the same endpoint.
10. A provisioning API to interwork with the customer’s CRM.
11. An architecture which allowed operation as a single unified system.
12. An ability to be customized.

Solution Delivered:

The solution was a success! Capitalizing on the Sky DANCE core components to transform their infrastructure into a state-of-the-art network with redundancy and massive scalability and then utilizing Sky-Networks’ technology and expertise, they were to able to deploy a proof-of-concept center in the new network and  build a prototype of their  service running in a SIP framework within a very short period to demonstrate the viability of the solution. After the proof-of-concept success, they put together a schedule to phase-in the new network and phase out the old and continue their expansion.   They are currently operating in 4 different data centers with both geographic and local redundancy with continued plans to grow!

What Sky Networks Provided:

1. Sky DANCE core to provide the system switching infrastructure including proxy, SBC, routing and translation
2. Sky PBX – to provide endpoint services
3. Sky Phone – Sky Phones core SIP stack/API technology was integrated into their partner’s iOS and Android solutions to provide captioning services for iOS and Android
4. Sky API – to interface with the customer’s existing CRM system when provisioning customers and to provide the APIs to interface the customer created application to control call processing while in a
5. Sky Networks professional services to provide consulting to their engineers and also to help architect and customize the Sky DANCE solution to meet their