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Title: SiPConnect by Network Intelligence, March 2011

Direct Link:  http://bit.ly/NI-SiPConnect

Description:  An overview of Network Intelligence's SIP carrier control solution for telecom agents, channel partners and IT consultants who's customers need help managing a multi-SIP carrier environment.

Contact: To learn more about how Network Intelligence helps telecom agents control their customer's SIP carriers
please call 888-373-7700 or email SipSuite@netg2.com.

PDF of Presentation: Click here to download

Keywords: SIP, multiple carriers, telecom agent, call center, contact center, channel partner, IT consultant, Network Intelligence, Ralph Widmar, SipConnect, Connect Plus

Video Download: Contact Dan@TelecomAssociation.com to get the embed code or file download.

Presentation Transcription:  PDF   DOC

Good afternoon,  and thank you very much for attending the presentation.  My name is Ralph Widmar, and I’m the Chief Executive Office of Network Intelligence. 

Today we are talking about one of the components of our SiP Suite of services, and we are going to be featuring our new product called SipConnect.

First I would like to say a few words about Network Intelligence.  We consider ourselves to be an enhanced solutions provider, and a managed service organization.  We have been around a long time.

We were started in 1985.  We got started doing an awful lot of consulting work with RBOX, CLECs, IOCs, vendors, end-users.  We did some work for some government entities in advising them about telecommunications, technology and regulatory issues. 

So we have a very, very deep expertise in the telecommunications industry. 

We have an awful lot of technical expertise.  We are familiar with both TDM and IP.   We have operated various types of telecommunications companies and networks.  So we are very proud of the expertise that we have, and of the solutions that we have been able to provide for clients over the years.

1:14    We provide a network services integration, and we also provide expertly managed delivery of standardized products.  We use a mix of service providers.  So we enable new SIP services that are using your carriers, so as an agent you can have your carriers, our managed services, and those are how we stir those together and have created our SiP Suite of services.

We also provide you with the management tools that you need in order to have SiP Suite services delivered, and as consultants and having a history in the consulting business, we take a highly professional and a consultative approach to selling customer solutions.

As an enhanced service provider, it is important to say, I think, what we are not. We are not a reseller.  We do not provide billing services. We don’t mark up carrier rate backs and resell those rate backs. We are also not a CLEC or a carrier.

We are existing in what we perceive to be a gap in the marketplace between agents and carriers, and to be able to provide services in a new way, and to enable and empower agents to sell new services.

2:24    I would like to talk for a minute about SiP Suite.  As we started off with the company several years ago, we started looking essentially to see some familiar things like SIP trunk, and we do have a whole family of SIP trunking products.

We provide tandem switching operations.  We provide partitions of switches for clients to use.  We do proxy, routing services, and as you can see, there are a variety of other services that we do provide. 

Some are for carriers. Some are for independent telephone companies.  Some are for web-enabled services that are provided to companies that are hosting websites and offering web services.

What we are going to focus on today is SipConnect, which we have developed really for being able to empower master agents to have better control of their customer base, and easier access to carriers and services.

SipConnect is designed to replace T1 dedicated loop access with SIP-enabled access via the Internet.  So this looks a lot like a SIP trunk, but it is really a replacement for dedicated services.

3:46   So if you have customers that have been using a dedicated TDM services for outbound calling, or for toll-free calling, what we can replace this with is SIP connectivity from our switch infrastructure to your customer, and this gives you virtual access to carrier and toll free services.

You can use new or existing carriers, and SipConnect, we offer you can use 2 carriers for redundancy.  Or, you can provide load balancing between 2 carriers.

And again, these are not our carriers that we have bought and marked up a rate back and are passing along to you.  These are carriers that you are selling today.

So we can load balance between those carriers. We can do real-time failover routing. And, there is no downtime when changing out a carrier. So this is really nice. I don’t know how many of you have ever been in a situation where you have a customer that you sold a rate back to, and everything was going great, and all of a sudden there was a big price hike.  You have to rip out all the old loop. You have to put in the new one.  Everybody gets crazy, and it is very disruptive for the customer.

4:55   In our solution, the carriers get changed out on the backend of our switch.  So the customer never sees that.  We are actually using session border controllers to provide all the security that carrier gave platforms.  They are redundant. And session border control gives us the ability to either register a customer, or to use a static IT so that we can connect directly to their network, and validate them based on their IP address.

It also does, and you have probably heard of the term customer network topology hiding. We do not reveal your customers IP address to the rest of the network.  We actually replace it with the address that is used on our session border controllers, so people are not going to be able to find their way back into your customer network.  So it provides an additional layer of security and control.

What we do is, we provide flat-rate access to SIP-based carrier services.  So up to 24 channels is $99.00.  If you have somebody that is up to 96 channels, it is $299.00 a month.  And any of the usage is billed and charged by the carrier, and it is billed and charged by the carrier the same way it is currently done today.

6:08   There is a onetime setup,  so they do interop  with us once with the loop, and the carrier and customer interop is included in the recurring charge of $199.95.  So one interop, one contact, and then we do all of the carrier interop, and the customer doesn’t have to fool with any of that.

So what we do is, we integrate with the master agent, or agent-delivered data services that you already offer too. So they do require an internet connection, whether it’s a dedicated internet connection, or whether it is an open, across the internet sort of service.

If it is somebody that has a PRI PBX, we do have to have an IAD. You need to have a dedicated internet access, or an IP PBX device. So if they have an IP capable PBX, that’s perfect.  We can talk to that, no problem at all.

So here’s the picture of the way things currently work.  It’s pretty simple.  There is a dedicated T1 voice loop service.  You have a carrier termination, or think about toll-free origination. There is a PRI, and it is connected to the customer PBX. 

1-1/2 meg, 23 channels.  It’s a fixed cost per month, usually with a commitment. There is no price break. If you have multiple P1s, they are pretty much all the same.

7:32   You lock a customer to a specific carrier through a physical infrastructure. There is no redundancy. This loop goes, you’re gone.  We have customers who have multiple IPs loops rather than PRIs, and if one of those IP carriers has an issue, once again the calls continue to flow.

So this requires a new interop to change out the carrier.  It requires a new loop. It’s cumbersome, it’s time consuming, and it does what the carriers want which is discouraged change.

SipConnect, this is a drawing of how you would connect to somebody who has a legacy PRI, or with a collection of telephones that are on FXS-types of loops that you would plug an RJ-11 jack into.  This is an IP integrated access device that makes the conversion from the SIP connection coming from our equipment to the PRI, or to the telephone or POTS line type of service that the customer is currently experienced with having.

We have our switching infrastructure in the middle, and then we communicate either with the legacy carrier, or a new carrier for SIP termination, and then we can also layer in additional carriers for other termination as well.

8:53   I could read all of this to you, but everybody is fully capable of reading this stuff themselves without hearing me going on in the background while I’m doing it. But the whole point is, this puts you in control of the customers access to the network, rather than letting the carrier control that access.

This is SipConnect, same drawing, but it also now just shows an IP PBX with a SIP connection. This is an IP connection.  That is something else that you would sell too.

So this gives you an opportunity to integrate the things that you are currently selling to your customer, and let us manage it on your behalf in an excellent way.

Now, once you have SipConnect, we also offer what we call SipConnect plus. These are enhanced services that layer on top of SipConnect.

One of those enhancements is access to multiple and redundant switches in our network. Rather than being connected to 1 switch, your customer can be connected to 2 switches, or more, and that way if there is some issue in the switching network, you can automatically be directed to the other switch.

10:03   It provides hot standby in the event of a network failure. Any of you who sell call center solutions know how important it is to be able to maintain continuity of service delivery, so that nobody is sitting in a call center where nobody is talking on the phone.

We also support multiple customer IPs for inbound toll-free termination and DID termination. So think about an inbound call center. We do call center routing right now that routes calls within the U.S.  When the U.S. shuts down, it routes them to the Philippines, then to Scotland, then to India, and then to you name it, we go around the world with that call routing.

We have extremely sophisticated call-routing capabilities for being able to route calls from multiple call centers, or do percentage call allocation by call center, time of day routing.  It’s on and on and on.

So again, if you are looking for customized solutions, highly available solutions, we can deliver those.  We support multiple carriers. The SipConnect Plus supports up to 4 terminating carriers for the same flat fee, and these are really combined into what we call our IntelliRoute LCR. We have very, very sophisticated call routing capabilities.

11:22   When you are doing an LCR that is 4 carriers, you will typically see savings in excess of 20%.  We are very comfortable talking about that savings, because we have seen it over and over again. Once again, we can also do time of day routing. 

The other nice thing about a least-cost route is, if you have one of the carriers on the route that is having an issue terminating calls, we just hop right over the top of them. The customer never knows the difference. So if you are looking for the ability to have higher ASRs, this is how you get it. And you also get to reduce your customer’s costs.

 We can support custom dial plans. If you have a customer that has 30 or 40 locations, or 100s of locations around the country, we can develop a custom dial plan that lets them go basically SIP to SIP, office to office, using a custom dial plan that we would work with you to create for them, and then they wouldn’t even transfer the carrier, they would only do backbone routing.

Those of you who have CEM solutions that you are offering for your customer, we can create and supply call detail records that are independent of the carrier records that are being generated, and you don’t have to go collect records from your customer’s switching equipment.

12:35   They are all collected by us, and we have a variety of ways of getting you those records, whether you want getting them on a CD, parked on an FTP site, or if they are very large streamed and real-time, we can do that for you.

We also have an extensive reporting capability, and we can be happy to show you some of the reporting capabilities that we have in the machine, so that you can see what is your customer doing? What did they do today?  What did they do this week in terms of how many calls, how many minutes.

And we also offer for the more security conscious client, we have IPsec tunneling so that we can offer encrypted signaling and speech. All of these as you can see, we have the same as Asterisk next to everything . They are priced per feature, and I don’t want to bore everybody by going into what all those prices are right now, but we would be happy to have those discussions with you.

So SipConnect Plus, once again we have our favorite diagram, and it is the same network topology, the same SIP connection where it is to an IP PBX or a legacy PRI-based PBX. We can support as many channels as you want.  We have some clients who have far more than 96 channels.

13:52   We support both inbound and outbound calling on the same circuit.  We layer in multiple carriers.  Least cost routing. Custom dial plans.  Securitized connections to the network.  And this is an all-in-one solution, an all-encompassing solution for your clients looking for a managed service.

So the benefits of SipConnect.  You have business continuity.  You can change or add carriers, or features, without having to disturb the customer. The customer only pays for features that they want.  SIP origination in many cases can eliminate intrastate and interstate jurisdictional considerations.

You can increase your commissions, and lower your customer’s costs, because obviously we do pay commissions on these services, and we would be happy to pay you commissions. We lower the barriers to making sales. We don’t mark up carrier rates, so we don’t have to add anything on top of the current carrier and neither do you.

14:58   Now, this also eliminates what we call a taker pay delay. I don’t know how many of you have been in a situation where you have a client who has 6 months to run on a contract with a current carrier, and they may be producing a lot more minutes in the way of volume, or burning down whatever their commitment is for their spend with the carrier, but you don’t have access to the rest of that traffic because they say, “Oh, come and see us in 6months.”  We say why wait?  We call this the taker pay delay. 

We can interop with them on a SIP trunk. We can groom their traffic so they send the appropriate amount of traffic to their current carrier. Then we can also take the overage, and we can route that traffic to another carrier, or to least cost routing, and when they get to the end of their commitment with that particular carrier, then can either retain them and mix them into the least cost route, or we can just make them go away and fade out, and there is no disruption to your client.

16:00   So, this provides you with a very high quality service that differentiates you from any other agent. It’s excellent call quality. You have feature control. We have a very scalable, very high call transaction engine. It lowers operating costs for the customer, and it gives you the benefit of being a carrier without the cost of ownership, without having to run a switch, and without the hassle of managing any operations.

So, we find ourselves at the end of the presentation. We are very excited about SipConnect, and about the clients that we have that are using this. We welcome any calls and emails that you may have, and we look forward to working with you.

Thank you very much.