For a 25-year-old automated enterprise-level voice
solutions provider, keeping up with the changes and challenges of a
steadily shifting world of networking began to take its toll -- on
the business and its workers -- forcing the development team to
work more on keeping the network up to date than actually
developing products and services to offer customers.
Specialising in personalised, multi-channeled automated
information and voice solutions, Intervoice has based its business
on helping other businesses design voice systems that improve
customer interactions. So when network demands began to weigh too
heavily on the development teams, Intervoice knew it was time to
find another solution.
With networks continually building out, more providers, like
Intervoice, have found that keeping up their own networks is
limiting their ability to improve their product offerings. Using
today's typical solution of "stovepiping," the cross-network
connections often suffer -- application delivery is impeded and
lacks transparency when connections aren't rewritten. As a result
of these challenges, Intervoice found itself in need of another
solution to keep its own network running so that it could continue
to offer customers the services they expected.
"We wanted a service that handled the network so we didn't have
to see or think about how it worked," said Andy Thomas, vice
president of Intervoice's product development. "Traditionally, we
had built our own telephony infrastructures, but that came to
dominate the work time of our own team. We needed someone else to
handle the network so we could continue to be the solutions
provider our customers expected us to be."
After searching for a service that would meet its needs,
Intervoice selected AppTrigger's Application Session Controller, a
solution designed with a purpose-built application delivery
architecture that provides specific call-control functions
independent of each network, reducing the need for application
stovepiping. AppTrigger said that the Application Session
Controller -- as a scalable, carrier-grade network platform
designed to
protect VoIP, IMS and legacy intelligent network applications
from a continually changing network -- future-proofs network
connectivity.
Focusing on interoperable solutions, AppTrigger describes itself
as a company that helps users insulate their revenue-producing
applications from the constantly changing world of networks through
the use of its Application Session Controller.
As IP networks will continue to be built out over the next 15 to
20 years, specifically in the service provider arena, other
intermediary solutions are needed, according to AppTrigger's vice
president of marketing, Patrick Fitzgerald.
"AppTrigger's Application Session Controller eliminates the
inefficiency of gateway stovepipes at the network layer while
enabling service providers to maintain and support legacy
applications, even while deploying and growing their
next-generation IMS architectures," said Ronald Gruia, principal
analyst of emerging telecom with research firm Frost and
Sullivan.
Thomas said that Intervoice chose the Application Session
Controller for its feature richness in comparison with other
similar tools. Using the service essentially as a gateway,
AppTrigger's handling of the connection to the network allows
Intervoice's team members to focus instead on building
infrastructure and application development.
Thomas said AppTrigger's controller essentially "handles our
network's plumbing."
In addition to freeing up Intervoice's R&D team to focus on
application development, the Application Session Controller is
supported by a robust platform which is extendable and on which
Intervoice can quickly and easily implement any changes, Thomas
found. Intervoice also wrote its own protocol-independent scripting
language to control the Application Session Controller's
interaction with the network.
Though some initial glitches appeared during the testing
process, Thomas said, AppTrigger's service and support helped
resolve issues quickly.
"Allowing our R&D team to focus on product development
rather than our own network's maintenance," he said, "has been the
proof that the Application Session Controller was our best
choice."