Vapps, Inc.

NMS Helps Deliver Carrier-Grade IP Audio Conferencing
As economic pressures and safety concerns continue to put a damper on business travel, audio conferencing has quickly emerged as the preferred form of long-distance business collaboration. According to International Data Corporation, the worldwide market for audio conferencing services is growing at a compound annual rate in excess of 50 percent.

For service providers, audio conferencing offers an attractive way to generate new revenue and reduce churn. But until recently, there were no IP audio conferencing bridges designed specifically for converged networks. That changed when NMS Communications customer Vapps introduced Conferencing Bridge 1000 (CB 1000) in the fall of 2003.

The product is already receiving an enthusiastic reception, not only from Vapps prospects, but also from industry analysts such as David Alexander of Frost & Sullivan. He recently wrote "The Vapps CB 1000 leverages the best of IP and TDM technologies to provide a feature rich and attractively priced reservationless bridge for service providers to provision business class conferencing."

Accelerated, Cost-Effective Development via Industry Standards
The road from initial vision to finished product was shortened for Vapps, which was founded in March of 2002 by entrepreneur Ben Lilienthal and a small group of telecommunications veterans. Determined to quickly stake their claim as a leading provider of high-quality, enhanced telecommunications infrastructure products for converged IP/TDM networks, Lilienthal and his team opted to pursue a development strategy that would minimize development time and cost while ensuring carrier-class reliability. That meant building their bridging software on top of proven, industry-standard components using the latest tools and techniques for fast, cost-effective development.

"Initially, we looked at media servers from a variety of vendors," said Lilienthal. "But rather than paying them to essentially package another vendor's DSP cards, we decided to go directly to the DSP manufacturers."

The Vapps team considered a handful of major DSP providers, including NMS.

"It was an extremely rigorous evaluation process," said Lilienthal. "We looked at size, cost, features, development environment. One of the key criteria for us was that it had to run on Linux, because that's what our developers preferred."

Satisfying All the Criteria for Success
Although Lilienthal and his team had had no prior experience working with NMS, they chose the NMS AG 4000 and CG 6000 platforms, for a variety of reasons. "The NMS products ran on Linux, they had the conferencing algorithms built in, they supported multiple codecs, and the price per port was very attractive," he said. The NMS platforms also supported all major industry standards, such as SIP.

To ensure that their audio conferencing bridge would offer industry-leading price/performance, the Vapps team also employed off-the-shelf Intel processors.

Carrier-Grade IP Audio Conferencing
The Vapps Conferencing Bridge 1000 is a modular software and hardware solution that enables service providers and large enterprises to reliably and continuously provision audio conference calls using VoIP and PSTN technology. A scalable, distributed, fault-tolerant system, the CB 1000 includes many value-added features, including:

• Support for multiple, simultaneous conferences with hundreds of participants
• CDR collection and output for billing
• Reservationless conferencing, Customizable IVR, Hierarchichal administration, Extensible architecture
• Web-based administration, control and scheduling
• Support for industry standards, including SIP, TDM, G.711, and G.729

Reducing Development Time and Strengthening Reliability
The combination of industry-standard components and value-added software development had a dramatic impact on time-to-market, according to Lilienthal. "By going with NMS and taking a modular approach to development, we reduced our development time by at least one-third," he said.

High reliability was an added bonus in selecting NMS. "We're selling to service providers who insist upon 'five nines' reliability — an hour of downtime a year," said Lilienthal. "That's why having the NMS components is so important, because we don't have to worry that that part of the system will break. We know it won't."

Meeting the Needs of Service Providers
Among the first companies to use the Vapps CB 1000 was Dedicated Conferencing, a US-based wholesale and retail provider of conferencing services. In an effort to increase bridging capacity while reducing costs, Dedicated Conferencing began a trial of the Vapps CB 1000 in July of 2003. In addition to the low cost per port, the company was attracted to the CB 1000's ease of administration, its ability to control conferences via the Web, and the administrative options available to the host, including the ability to enable/disable callers to access the conference prior to the host joining the call.

"The Vapps CB 1000 provides the feature set our users need at a price point that gives us a competitive advantage," said Adam Brothers, General Manager of Dedicated Conferencing. "Furthermore, it gives us the flexibility to provide IP-based services in addition to traditional TDM interfaces."

Among the other large enterprises, service providers, and resellers evaluating the CB 1000 is a major North American Service Provider that sees the Vapps product as a way to reduce the cost of supporting intercontinental audio conferences by at least 25 percent.

A Relationship Focused on Success
Throughout the intense process of developing and bringing a new product to market, Ben Lilienthal has been greatly impressed with the level of support Vapps has received from NMS. "They've taken a real interest in our product and sort of taken us under their wing," he said. "They've done everything from lending us equipment to get started, to asking us for input on the next generation of their product. You can't buy that kind of relationship."

Looking ahead, Lilienthal sees a promising future for Vapps and NMS. "Our long-term goal is to leverage our core engine into other, high-margin, enhanced services," he explained. When that happens, NMS will again supply essential components of the Vapps solution. "We're excited about some of the next-generation IP-only boards that NMS is working on," said Lilienthal. "They will continue to drive the cost down while maintaining the same level of carrier-grade reliability."