Virtela Communications today announced that Beacon Global Services Corporation has implemented the first end-to-end voice and data call center network solution utilizing multiple IP backbones spanning the United States and India.
"There simply wasn't another network service provider who could deliver the voice quality and state-of-the-art call center functionality that our project specifications required at the cost-savings model we had to meet. There was no carrier that could provide us with an end-to-end connection between our New York and Hyderabad call centers, re-routing traffic, and delivering applications like CD-quality voice over IP, video conferencing, and collaboration tools all on the same private network," said Sudhir Seth, vice president and business unit head at Beacon Global Services. "Furthermore, Virtela has provided us with continuous network monitoring software in our offices. We can see exactly what is going on across our global routes at all times. We also see exactly how we are leveraging Virtela's multiple carrier approach. Individual carriers do not offer that level of transparency and confidence in their network availability and performance."
For Beacon, Virtela provided extensive consultation to determine the best solution, and ultimately delivered a network infrastructure and cost structure considered to be cutting edge among call centers. Beacon expects to realize savings of 75% over projected costs for a previously planned private line solution. Virtela continues to deliver advanced monitoring, management and support services to Beacon, meeting call center stringent SLAs (service level agreements) of 99.999% reliability.
"This customized solution was about giving the customer the greatest amount of flexibility while drastically decreasing their network costs. For a call center business, that's core to the business model," said Vab Goel, Virtela Chairman and CEO. "Beacon is the ultimate example of what IP networks should provide to businesses; IP voice, web chat, co-browsing, video conferencing, every possible form of voice, video and data transmission, all moving on private intelligent networks while delivering significant cost savings. For call centers in India in particular, where the infrastructure is still at an early stage, it is critical for them to partner with a managed network services firm that has the ability to reroute traffic on multiple carriers when difficulties arise on routes connecting India and the U.S."
Virtela monitors and supports customer installations via two Network Operations Centers (NOCs) based in Denver, Colorado and Mumbai, India. Also, today, a separate announcement provides details about the Mumbai operations. Intrinsic to Virtela's offering to all its customers is a carrier and vendor-neutral platform that gives customers redundancy protection only available with a multi-carrier approach. With real-time application performance monitoring, administrators can isolate and troubleshoot any performance bottlenecks quickly and decisively. Virtela's IP Service Fabric (IPSF(SM)) network infrastructure exploits proprietary algorithms that route customer traffic via the best-performing path over multiple Tier-1 backbones, providing the highest availability private IP network.
"This carrier-agnostic position we hold is very important to our customers," said Goel. "By having partnerships with over 150 carriers around the globe, we have a unique ability to ensure our customers are always on the fastest global routes. We have no incentive to keep a customer on anything but a completely optimized network at all times. We provide the HOV lane for enterprise network traffic."
Beacon offers its customers, including Marriott, Spinnaker Resorts and Sunterra Resorts, in-bound, out-bound and web-enabled contact center services that increase their customers' satisfaction, gather market intelligence and increase revenue. Beacon goes beyond traditional call center telephone service by offering web call back, web chat, co-browsing and custom email and fax interactions. This advanced web services approach is resulting in double- digit annual growth for Beacon and it is expected to grow the firm to over 1000 agent seats by late 2004.