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April 18, 2005
IP Unity Unveils BCS Case Study
Executive Summary
BCS Global is leveraging its unique lead in Hosted IP Video service delivery into a compelling portfolio of wholesale IP Communication Services. Together with IP Unity, this North American service provider is preparing to deliver a value proposition and expertise unlike any other, to carriers, ISPs and integrators worldwide.
Background
In 2000, BCS Global started operations as a next generation service provider with a decidedly different focus than any other ‘next-gen’ in North America: the delivery of a real-time video application over IP networks to enterprises and the carriers who serve them. At the time, this was a radical notion. Today, it is clear that the company demonstrated great foresight.
Since then, BCS Global has served carriers, marketing companies and audio/visual integrators with a unique hosted Virtual Presence‘ service for simple-to-use, maintenance free, flat rate, real-time videoconferencing and collaboration service, thereby building a loyal subscriber base of small and medium-sized enterprise users. BCS Global has also built a well-respected team of expert provisioning and management technicians who design, activate, monitor and support its IP services from its Network Operations Center in Toronto. Its five years of very successful operation -- no small feat during the telecom meltdown -- enabled the company to vault into new services and geographic expansion during 2004 – 2005.
In mid-2004, BCS Global expanded its portfolio through the acquisition of IPConvergence, a wholesale hosted Voice over IP company with the same wholesale approach and business model as BCS Global. President and CEO Piero Romani launched BCSTone managed VoIP services, thus expanding offerings into a growing service suite. While VoIP is often the first service that IP-centric providers offer to the market, this set of services gave BCS Global the opportunity to bundle both voice and video in a carrier-by-carrier customized fashion. Hosted VoIP also demonstrated BCS Global’s ability to quickly add new feature sets, scale to meet rapidly growing demand, and integrate voice into the provisioning, support and billing paradigm it had built for its Virtual Presence‘ service.
Shifting the Paradigm
Fast-forward to the first quarter of 2005: BCS Global is again moving ahead of the crowd, taking the next step into a full-featured and customizable multimedia messaging, video streaming, and conferencing portfolio. Company leadership envisions a strategic capability for all messaging, collaboration to be provisioned via one unified IP infrastructure. For this, BCS Global requires a modular, highly scalable and carrier-class applications platform, already field-proven through many large and successful carrier deployments and seamlessly integrated with the Cisco BTS10200 softswitch core. BCS Global also undertakes new market expansion by launching offices and network facilities in the United Kingdom.
To power its newest service expansion, BCS Global has turned to IP Unity, a leader in carrier–grade media servers, application servers and real-time multimedia applications over IP and TDM networks. IP Unity’s HMS6000‘ platform has proven to be the only enhanced services system to scale to over 30,000 ports, works seamlessly with Cisco’s IP telephony architecture, provides rapid payback through the delivery of many messaging, conferencing and communications features over one platform, and offers a future path to many innovative business applications over any transport network a carrier prospect operates or needs to traverse.
“We are continually enhancing and advancing our feature sets, our flexibility in bundling and customization, and our in-house knowledge base in customer applications,” states BCS Global Chief Technology Officer Dan Tanel. “IP Unity has been a great partner in all respects. Its platform enables us to add and innovate within the messaging and auto attendant features. We can mix and match, customize and partition services from one unified platform. And the team has been extraordinarily supportive in terms of knowledge transfer in its applications. We are ramping very fast in our own expertise for these new services, and this is essential to our value in the marketplace.”
Making the Case for New Services
BCS Global set specific performance hurdles for its newest services and its unified service architecture, to meet and beat the expectations of both carrier and integrator clients. Since BCS Global’s model is wholesale in nature, its customer base is savvy carriers and integrators whose core business is communications, with very low tolerance exists for learning on the job, do-overs or missed expectations in new service delivery.
BCS Global requirements include
- Streamlined service activation process;
- Highly modular first cost, low incremental cost to scale and very rapid payback (less than nine months) on IP service delivery infrastructure;
- Easy integration of new services into the BCS Global technical support model;
- Feature transparency across any geographic market (viable for any language, any end-user interface, any branding, any end device); and
- Ownership of vendor-partners in addressing unforeseen technical challenges and issues.
IP Unity ensured that each of these performance parameters was met as the HMS6000 was deployed, because the media server/application server platform was designed to deliver
- Service activation within hours,
- Payback between three and seven months,
- A single unified OSS, NMS and OAM&P for all services,
- Multi-language support and network agnostic operation,
- Device/display adaptability and user-interface transparency, and
- Continuous in-field and remote technical support as well as tight engineering coordination with Cisco technical support.
Drilling Down into the Solution
At a granular level within the BCS Global infrastructure, IP Unity’s system works with the Cisco BTS 10200 softswitch to direct incoming calls and broker connections for messaging, auto attendant or other feature functions within the IP Unity application server and media server. The media server also works with the Cisco media gateway to exchange TDM and IP signals to and from traditional circuit-switched networks.
The media server retrieves voicemails, announcements, and other content from a Network File Store, while the application server authorizes the media server to play announcements or message content for approved users. As needed, the media server also transcodes stored data into audible form or wav files before the announcement or message is played or forwarded, to a multitude of devices.
Instructions between these network elements are passed via the open SIP protocol. The IP Unity HMS6000 platform is fully SIP compliant, easing its interoperability with virtually any new network element and facilitating BGS Global’s processing of virtually any message or media type, over any network type.
BCS Global plans to add a session border controller and SIP feature server to enhance its infrastructure and communicate with the IP Unity messaging platform.
Value to the Enterprise
One of BCS Global’s most successful enterprise end-users has been the Norshield Financial Group, a well-established national financial services, funds management and advisory services firm with nearly $1 billion in assets under management.
Norshield had been a satisfied customer of BCS Global’s Virtual Presence services for several years, and came to BCS Global and its transport partner Cogent in 2004 to consolidate voice, video and data collaboration services over IP, thus eliminating the purchase of a new phone system in Norshield’s relocated Chicago and Toronto offices. The company also wanted to plan for the future convergence of all telecommunications services over IP for four major offices in three countries.
By implementing BCSTone services, Norshield was able to bypass traditional long-distance charges, work with a single source for all services and greatly simplify its intra-firm communications with four-digit dialing, voicemail and auto-attendant features between offices in Chicago, Toronto and Bridgeport, Barbados.
The IP Unity enabled feature expansions are key to meeting Norshield’s long term requirements as Norshield plans to subscribe to BCS Global’s newest BCSTone Integrated Messaging package.
“We look forward to further innovations in voice, video, messaging and multimedia, to expand our opportunity and value for key users like Norshield Financial,” emphasized BCS Global CEO Piero Romani. “IP Unity is our strategic partner in these applications, as its systems help us bundle the best features, achieve the best cost economies, and compress time-to-market in a way that clearly keeps us ahead of the competition.”
Posted by anna at April 18, 2005 08:03 PM