By Rob Collins, Director of Marketing, Voice Mobility
Voice Mobility, Inc., a Vancouver-based developer and provider of carrier-grade enhanced messaging solutions, has relied on NMS Communications for over ten years to provide enabling media processing technology. Voice Mobility’s current offering, the UCN product suite, includes three enhanced messaging systems that meet enterprise and carrier demands for reliability, availability, and scalability—and answers a growing business requirement to replace voicemail systems with sophisticated unified communications.
A Long-Standing Partnership
Voice Mobility and NMS became partners in 1997, when Voice Mobility built its first unified communications platform. Voice Mobility was looking for a development platform that offered high port density, affordability, and carrier-class reliability on which to build a TDM-based solution for Internet service providers (ISP), applications service providers (ASP) and competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC). After evaluating several options, Voice Mobility chose NMS’s AG Series telephony boards with the Natural Access™ software development environment, which allowed Voice Mobility to leverage NMS’s leading media processing technology. As Voice Mobility’s products have evolved, NMS’s technology has continued to meet Voice Mobility’s development needs.
When it came time to add IP support to their offering, Voice Mobility again turned to NMS. NMS’s CG Series boards offer both TDM and IP support, and use the same programming environment, Natural Access, as used in Voice Mobility’s earlier development efforts.
Using the CG boards, Voice Mobility built the UCN unified communications platforms, which are aimed at mid- to large-sized enterprises and carriers of all sizes. The consistent programming interface between the AG boards and the CG simplified the job of adding IP capability to the UCN platform.
The UCN application meets enterprise and carrier objectives for converged messaging platforms today and supports future messaging services on a common, open-standards platform. And because Voice Mobility’s software code base is the same for each of its three UCN products, it is easy to migrate to larger deployments as business needs grow.
Easing Voicemail Replacement and Containing Costs
A key benefit of the NMS-Voice Mobility partnership is the UCN platform’s ability to replicate the functionality of older voicemail systems, such as those from Octel, making the UCN suite the preferred replacement for enterprise voicemail systems.
When replacing an existing voicemail system with a UCN product, there is minimal impact on the end user who continues to use voicemail as normal, with no major training required. The UCN’s open-standards design makes it easy to integrate with existing infrastructure, such as multiple switches in multiple locations. It provides flexible deployment options, including high-speed, low-latency designs or higher latency, data network designs. And the UCN can run in both TDM and IP networks, easing the migration to IMS environments. All of these factors help Voice Mobility lead the market in low total cost of ownership.
The UCN Platform
Available in three models, ranging from low-cost, low-density to large-scale, carrier-grade solutions with no single points of failure, the UCN platforms offer an open and modular architecture that is scalable from 50 to 1 million users.
The CG Series boards are a key element in the current range of Voice Mobility’s UCN platforms. Voice Mobility does extensive load test of the NMS boards in the lab to ensure they meet Voice Mobilitiy’s requirements for reliability and performance.
Figure 1: Voice Mobility’s mid-range solution, the UCN 250
Deployment Flexibility
The UCN solution is deployed as either a customer premise solution (CPE), as a managed service on the customer site but hosted by a third party, or as a fully hosted offering in a remote data center. Hosted messaging is ideal for small- to mid-sized companies with 50 to 1000 subscribers, offering an affordable way to provide subscribers with all the benefits of enhanced messaging, without the up-front technology costs.
Continued Innovation
On the horizon for the UCN product suite is a host-based solution, built on NMS’s PacketMedia™ HMP. PacketMedia HMP, which leverages the Natural Access development environment, is a scalable and cost-effective host media processing platform that allows Voice Mobility to deploy their UCN application on standard, general-purpose computing platforms without the need for specialized hardware. This newest UCN platform is ideal for the small business market and branch offices looking for a low-cost, low-density solution.
For more information on the UCN product suite, visit the Voice Mobility web site at www.voicemobility.com/index-products.html.
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Rob Collins may be reached at rcollins@voicemobility.com