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The Customer

This leading service provider manages a global network over which it delivers a range of on-demand web meeting and collaboration services such as web conferencing, online sales calls, web-based support, remote training and online events. These applications help businesses accelerate sales cycles, increase revenues, improve employee productivity, speed products to market, enhance customer satisfaction and decrease training and travel costs. The company provides its on-demand applications to corporations, technology companies and telecommunication providers worldwide.

The Challenge

This Web collaboration pioneer had achieved enormous success by delivering its unique web-based conferencing services across its geographically distributed IP network. Management realized that the voice conferencing capabilities – which were then being provided by 3rd party vendors – offered the company a major new revenue stream.

However, this vendor also realized that bringing voice conferencing capabilities in house posed some significant challenges. Its integration of highly deterministic IP voice services would be the market’s first true test of resiliency and fastest-achievable recovery speeds for a highly scaled, geographically dispersed deployment of real-time, performance-sensitive services.

While momentary interruptions in Web images are either undetectable or at least non-intrusive to subscribers and conference moderators, voice services are a different matter and a far greater challenge: a brief interruption is apparent during 2-party calls. Such a momentary IP service outage would be particularly pronounced in a hosted multi-user service session: Even a fraction of a second’s interruption could force all audio conference participants to terminate and restart a conferencing session. This was why many established carriers had, up to that point in time, balked at offering IP-based conferencing services despite their obvious economic, flexibility and innovation advantages.

The Solution

The service provider deployed Pactolus’ SIPware Conference Calling IP Voice Application, which it tightly integrated within its meeting environment and across its application portfolio, enabling it for the first time to provide multimedia capabilities that include high quality IP voice conferencing services.

The availability of its voice service was ensured with Pactolus’ InService™ multi-site high availability software, an optional component for its widely-deployed, massively-scalable SIPware™ Audio Conferencing application. InService gave the service provider unprecedented IP voice service resiliency and fastest-achievable recovery speeds for highly scaled, geographically disperse deployments. As a result, this Web collaboration innovator now intelligently manages and automatically sustains its IP voice service across multiple, geographically-dispersed service points of presence simultaneously, and can:

• Load balance service-enabling resources, including application server and media server resources, across multiple geographically-dispersed service POPs;
• Re-route call traffic in real time across multiple sites in the event of media gateway, application server, and media
  server failures;
• Automatically invoke database and call processing at alternative service POPs without call interruption, in the event of a primary site failure.

• Protecting both its overall service call capacity and individual conferences in process, should any of a myriad of
  common or extraordinary IP component/network failures occur;
• Optimizing its ongoing utilization of all service-enabling resources and investments over its geographically distributed network; and
• Successfully synchronizing voice and Web services both as a customer service product, and as incremental revenue stream.