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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.
Related links:
Rob Collins may be reached at rcollins@voicemobility.com
By Jamie Warter, Vice President Product Marketing, Communications Platforms
Wikipedia defines a predictive dialer as "a computerized system that automatically dials batches of telephone numbers for connection to agents assigned to sales or other campaigns." New legal and regulatory restrictions such as the national Do Not Call Registry and the need for tightened identify verification of financial and medical information disclosure are driving the need for much more sophistication in the technology driving these systems.
Predictive dialers are primarily used by telemarketing and customer service organizations involved in B2C (business to consumer) calling as it allows their sales representatives to have much more customer contact time. Predictive dialers may also be used by market survey companies and debt collection services that need to contact and personally speak to a lot of people by telephone. Increasingly, predictive dialers are being used as a quick and easy way to automate all sorts of calls that would otherwise be made manually by a call center, such as welcome calls for new customers, customer service call backs, appointment reminders, or even for the automation of large numbers of ad hoc calls that might take place (such as by a taxi company or parcel delivery service, etc.). A predictive dialer can dramatically increase the time an agent spends on communication rather than waiting. Recent studies indicated an increase in talk time from twenty minutes per hour to almost fifty minutes per hour when a predictive dialer is used.
Another emerging trend is leveraging VoIP capabilities within the contact center and into predictive dialing. Many telemarketing organizations are deploying distributed call center resources in areas where labor costs are cheaper and using home-based agents helps to broaden the labor pool. VoIP-based solutions are also used to reduce reliance on traditional T1 and E1 lines, allowing telemarketing companies to lower costs even further.
Given the productivity gains and the need to adhere to various telemarketing laws, an interactive response system that does not include some predictive dialing capabilities limits the wider opportunities presented for interactive voice response systems.
NMS Communications supplies media processing boards and servers to a number of companies that sell and support predicative dialing systems. One example is Ontario Systems (www.ontariosystems.com), a technology leader in collection software solutions. Ontario is using NMS’s Vision VoiceXML Server as part of its Verified Contacts solution. Verified Contacts uses dialing and interactive voice response technology to increase right-party contacts. As the predictive dialer senses an answer on an outbound call, the interactive voice response functionality uses pre-recorded messages, in conjunction with the Vision VoiceXML Server’s ability to process text-to-speech technology, to ask for the account holder or party responsible for the debt. With this functionality, Ontario Systems’ applications can quickly validate that the right person answered the phone, meeting the tightened identity regulations without reducing the efficiency of the predictive dialing system.
SoundBite Communications (www.soundbite.com), is another market innovator using NMS’s technology in their predictive dialing application. With more than a half billion customer messages delivered, SoundBite is one of the industry’s leading providers of on-demand customer communications solutions. SoundBite’s applications allow companies in the financial, healthcare, and other industries to achieve their customer contact goals, while eliminating the need to invest in costly on-premise systems and software. SoundBite is using NMS’s Natural Access IP and SIP technology to move its speech-based solutions to VoIP, which will allow SoundBite to maintain cost-competitive pricing and, equally important, to provide even more features and capabilities to drive customer satisfaction and grow their businesses.
Developers of predictive dialers have a broad range of technology options when working with NMS. Our Open Access boards and software give developers flexibility and a range of platforms and tools that make it easy to respond to industry trends and build new dialing algorithms from the ground up. Our Vision VoiceXML Server, with its support of open scripting languages such as VoiceXML and CCXML, leverages a web-based model to manage delivery of customer contact information, as well as rapid call transfer to appropriate live agents.
For more information on either of these products, contact your NMS sales representative or visit the NMS web site at www.nmscommunications.com/DevPlatforms/default.htm.
Product News
The Vision Media Gateway and SS7 Signaling Server have completed compliance testing by Avaya, a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems and services. Specifically, the Vision product offerings have been certified for compatibility with the Web Services-based Avaya Voice Portal 4.0, an interactive response platform used by both enterprise and carrier customers as a central component of their customer contact center operations.
The highly scalable, carrier-grade Vision Media Gateway and Signaling Server are deployed globally and built on open, industry-standard technology, allowing Avaya’s IP-based Voice Portal solution to be used in any network, anywhere. When NMS Vision solutions are integrated with Avaya’s innovative offering, network operators and businesses can easily and cost-effectively reap the benefits of new technology and get more out of their communications infrastructure.
NMS is a member of the Avaya Developer Connection Program—an initiative to develop, market and sell innovative third-party products that interoperate with Avaya technology and extend the value of a company’s investment in its network.
As a Gold-level member of the program, NMS is eligible to submit products for compatibility testing by the Avaya Solution Interoperability and Test Lab in Lincroft, N.J. There a team of Avaya engineers develops a comprehensive test plan for each application to verify whether it is Avaya compliant. Doing so ensures businesses can confidently add best-in-class capabilities to their network without having to replace their existing infrastructure—speeding deployment of new applications and reducing both network complexity and implementation costs.
Partner News
By Timothy Resker, Voice Application Sales Consultant, Magma
As server manufacturers increasingly move away from supporting full-size PCI-X slots, developers are facing restricted choices for server deployment if their solution is based on full-size PCI-X boards, such as Open Access products. Fortunately, the availability of expansion enclosures makes the choice of application servers almost limitless. By deploying Open Access PCI boards in expansion enclosures, virtually any available server can be used as an application computing platform.
Expansion enclosures consist of three main components (see Figure 1). The first component is the enclosure itself, which comprises a chassis containing an expansion motherboard, a power supply, and cooling. The expansion motherboard provides PCI-X or PCI Express slots and the necessary logic for the host interconnect. The chassis, power supply, and cooling fans are sized and designed depending upon the number of slots provided and type of boards to be used. Slots provided can range from a single slot up to 13 slots in a single enclosure.
The second component is the interconnect cable that connects the expansion enclosure to the server. The cable length can be as long 2 meters and is specifically designed to fully utilize the chosen interconnect technology.
The third component is the host bus adapter card which can be provided as a low-profile PCI/PCI-X card, a low-profile PCI Express card, or a PCMCIA type card for laptops.
Figure 1: Magma PE6R4, a 6 slot PCI-X expansion enclosure with a PCI Express host bus adapter
Expansion enclosures provide many choices for application server deployment. OEMs, service providers, and enterprise users often prefer to utilize servers from large commercial computer manufacturers, such as Dell, because of factors such as access to the latest technology, cost effectiveness, worldwide support, and OEM services. While many of these servers don’t provide the full-length PCI-X slots required for NMS boards, expansion enclosures provide an effective means to address this issue. According to Jeff Chien, Systems Consultant for Dell’s Industry Solutions Group, "Many NMS customers have come to Dell wishing to deploy their applications on our servers. We’ve partnered with Magma to provide the right number and type of slots required for these applications."
Magma is a pioneer and industry leader in the design and manufacture of expansion enclosure solutions, and Magma expansion enclosures have been successfully tested for use with Open Access boards (see Figure 1). Please visit the Magma web site at www.magma.com or contact Magma’s Voice Application Sales Consultant Tim Resker at +1-781-752-8250 or tresker@comcast.net for more information on Magma products. Please contact Andrew Dodenhoff at Andrew_Dodenhoff@Dell.com for information on Dell’s OEM services.
Articles and Publications
Creating Interactive Voice and Video Applications
The application brief, Creating Interactive Voice and Video Applications, explores how easy consumer interaction with content is what will drive revenue from video applications for mobile and broadband subscribers. The need to constantly refine user interfaces to rapidly expanding video content provides ongoing challenges for application developers. The emergence of scripting languages that leverage web models and support a variety of media can reduce the development timelines to bring these new applications to market and save time and money!
Read the application brief and get your copy of this application brief here.
Advanced Call Control through CCXML
The application brief, Advanced Call Control through CCXML, discusses how the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines Call Control eXtensible Markup language (CCXML) as a developing standard for managing and supporting telephony call control with a VoiceXML-based application. While it is designed to be used with any media capable dialog application, CCXML’s key benefit is the ability to complement and integrate with VoiceXML to setup, monitor, and tear down phone calls.
Read the application brief and get your copy of this application brief here.
Web Update
On September 21, NMS launched a new look for its web site. Those of you who have visited the site in the last week will notice that we have softened the overall design by introducing a new color scheme, updating images, changing fonts and re-designing the individual market sections. There are no changes to the functionality of the site, so you will still be able to download software, white papers, web semiinar archives and other documents in exactly the same way as before.
The Developer Platforms section of the web site has undergone a reorganization, making it easier for you to find information about our products as well as the applications you can implement with them. In addition, the section on "Technologies" now includes overviews of the technologies featured in both our Open Access and Vision product lines.
We are very excited about these changes and hope that the new navigation will make it easier for you to find the content you are looking for. You can check out the new web site by going to www.nmscommunications.com. If you have any comments or suggestions, please send them to webmaster@nmss.com.
Spotlight Events
Less than a week to go before NMS’s Connect 2007 Conference comes to Boston on October 2 & 3. Connect is unlike any other vendor sponsored event, one that is committed to understanding the opportunities and challenges the industry faces. And our new event format has created quite a buzz in the industry. As Andrew Bud, Executive Chairman and Co-founder of mBlox said, "Connect is a high-energy symposium with some real edge."
You will see below that Connect in Boston features top-notch speakers from innovative companies that span the mobile communications ecosystem. Just take a look at our program.
Industry Overview
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Andrew Bud, Executive Chairman and Founder, mBlox |
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Hassan Ahmed, Ph.D., CEO and Chairman, Sonus Networks |
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Seamus McAteer, Chief Product Architect and Senior Analyst, M:Metrics, Inc. |
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Speaker to be named, Virgin Mobile, USA |
Application Innovation
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Gianluca Ferranti, Director of Marketing, Reitek S.p.A. |
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Colm Healy, CEO, XIAM |
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Stan Reiss, General Partner, Matrix Partners |
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Seamus McAteer, Chief Product Architect and Senior Analyst, M:Metrics, Inc. |
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Sunil Vemuri, Co-Founder and CPO, QTech Inc. |
The User?
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Ewald Anderl, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, Kirusa |
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John Puterbaugh, Ph.D., Founder and Chief Strategist, Nellymoser |
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Jud Bowman, Chief Technology Officer, Motricity |
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Russ McGuire, Strategy, Sprint Nextel |
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Ken Olewiler, Managing Director, PUNCHCUT |
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Community Goes Mobile
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Bill Makley, Marketing Programs Director, Nokia Siemens Networks |
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Prakash Iyer, Founder and CEO, envIO networks |
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Nicolas Arauz, Co-founder and Managing Director, Xipto LLC |
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Dan Melinger, CEO, Socialight |
Mashups: Web Meets Telco
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Matt Gross, Director of Product Management, WHERE by uLocate Communications |
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Kevin Nethercott, President and COO, LignUp |
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Michael Zirngibl, President and CEO, Angel.com |
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Alan Quayle, Consultant, Business and Service Development |
Increasing Service Velocity
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Jouni Welander, Head of New Solutions US, Nokia Siemens Networks |
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Kjell M. Johansson, Director of Solutions Management, Multimedia, Market Unit North America, Ericsson |
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Douglas Tucker, CTO NA, Ubiquity Software Corporation |
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Susan Norris, Communications Industry Advisor, Norport Technology Management Consulting |
The second day of Connect allows developers to roll-up their sleeves and focus on the tools behind the innovation. Day Two’s Super Sessions, each 3 1/2 hours long, take a deep dive into service creation tools for rapid development and deployment. Attendees can get beyond the buzz of high availability and ATCA and gain a practical understanding of next generation media processing platforms. Day Two also allows developers to meet face-to-face with NMS’s technical experts, as well as their industry partners, to address the challenging questions and problems developers face when delivering applications and value-added services.
Day 2 Session Descriptions
www.nmscommunications.com/Connect2007/Americas/Conference/DayTwo/default.htm
NMS is pleased to provide this industry forum and hope the event creates educational and networking benefits that will ultimately turn into business and development success for everyone. Registration for Connect 2007 in Boston is easy and admission is free.
Registration:
www.regonline.com/Checkin.asp?EventId=129040
For more details on Connect in Boston, visit the Connect Americas page: www.nmscommunications.com/Connect2007/Americas.
And Don’t Miss Out on Our Special Event at KING’S on Tuesday, October 2
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Bowling, Cocktails, Food, and Fun
in the Heart of Boston
You’ll be able to kick back and enjoy fantastic food, lively music and of course bowling with other attendees while NMS serves up a memorable event you won’t want to miss!
This is a complimentary event for conference delegates. The dress code is casual.
www.nmscommunications.com/Connect2007/Americas/Events/default.htm |
In addition to our Connect Americas Conference in Boston, NMS is also hosting the Connect Conferences in Guilin, China, October 17-18 and in Madrid, Spain, November 7-8.
Each conference will provide a forum for the industry to come together and discuss how to accelerate change in the world of mobile communications while delivering successful services with rapid time to market. This year, we have selected four conference topics that we believe are vital issues the global industry needs to contend with: the user experience, the importance of mobile communities, the growing practice of Mashups, and the role IMS plays in achieving service velocity.
Event Overview:
Day One features a full day of Industry Panel sessions and concludes with a special evening event
Day Two focuses on the technology behind the innovation and includes two Super Sessions devoted to AdvancedTCA and Accelerated Application Development
Both days provide demonstrations in the Solutions Showcase area and plenty of time for networking
For more information on our Connect events in Asia or Europe, speaker biographies, and to register, please visit our web site at:
In its eleventh year of running, VON has been the global meeting place for the most influential executives and companies in VoIP and IP communications. The scope and direction of the industry’s future takes shape at every VON conference. This is the place to meet key players and see the future of VoIP.
Exhibiting
NMS will be exhibiting in booth number 1143, where we will be featuring our market-ready solutions for converged multimedia applications.
Speaking
Brough Turner, Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Officer, will be speaking on Wednesday, October 31, 11:00 am to 12:15 pm on the panel "Trend Spotting."
Meeting request
If you are interested in arranging a meeting with an NMS representative at the show, please email janice_manning@nmss.com, indicating your preferred meeting date and area of interest.
If you missed our web seminar on September 18, and are interested in the CCXML standard, usage models for IVR applications, and solutions for developing CCXML-based applications, then check out our new webinar archive!
Maggie Smith, Director of Product Marketing, and Dr. Roland Auckenthaler, Principal Engineer, NMS, spoke about "Enabling Call Control for IVR Applications." In their presentation, they discussed how the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines Call Control eXtensible Markup language (CCXML) as a developing standard for managing and supporting telephony call control with a VoiceXML-based application. While it is designed to be used with any media capable dialog application, CCXML’s key benefit is the ability to complement and integrate with VoiceXML to setup, monitor, and tear down phone calls.
Access the archived recording and or PDF today at www.nmscommunications.com/DevPlatforms/EventsPromotions/WebSeminars/default.htm#VoiceXML
On October 30, 2007,
NMS will present the web seminar
Media Processing: Host- vs. Hardware-Based Approaches
When designing solutions for today’s communications environment, application developers must make a number of decisions concerning technology and system architecture, including the use of software- vs. hardware-based media processing. Host media processing (HMP) software and digital signal processing (DSP) hardware provide a selection of right-sized solutions for a broad range of system implementations. The choice of solution depends on the system requirements, including attributes such as density, availability, vocoding needs, and network connectivity (IP and/or TDM).
This webinar will explore the suitability of HMP- and DSP-based media processing solutions for meeting a variety of system requirements and attributes.
Who should attend:
Product managers, systems architects and developers developing and deploying video based applications for fixed telecom and mobile environments.
Register now at www.nmscommunications.com/nmswebinar3 for this web seminar on
October 30 at 11:00 am Eastern / 8:00 am Pacific.