Platform Feature

For wholesale carriers, routing calls is not the same game it used to be: They are interconnecting with more operators than ever before to take full advantage of the best available rates for transport -- which is great, because it results in greater competition and lower rates for consumers -- but they are also facing increased network complexity, due to the fact that every carrier uses a different mix of network technologies, and calls must be accurately routed across multiple platforms, with an eye towards quality.

What’s more wholesale rates are continuously changing, which means telecom operators must be able to route intelligently to get the best rate on every connection if they are to compete and stay vital. In fact, in these days of tight margins and fierce competition, intelligent switching (i.e. least cost routing) has become crucial to every telecom operator’s success.

New Jersey-based Global Convergence Solutions offers a suite of carrier grade tools that helps operators more intelligently route calls, in real time, and on an automated basis, thus helping them lower transport and management costs. The company’s flagship product GCS (News - Alert) Dynamic Route Manager is a next generation routing management system that gives carriers complete control over how every call is routed across the network by simplifying the creation of Least Cost Routing tables and the overall management process.

Meanwhile GCS’ Dynamic Rate Manager is next generation billing and rating management system that, in the words of company Chief Executive Neal Axelrad, “allows carriers to manage every aspect of rating, supplier management, customer management, billing and reporting. Think of it as a one stop shop for managing all of your suppliers, all of your customers and being able to invoice and bill on them.”

The company wraps these products with its Professional Services, which helps operators not only understand how to use the tool set to full advantage, but also “how to properly run their business” Axelrad said.

GCS got it start in 2006 when, after a brief stint at voice peering company InfiniRoute, Neal and Jay Meranchik, both formerly with VoIP peering company ITXC (Axelrad ran North American Carrier Sales, while Meranchik was president of global network operations and engineering) founded the company with a mission to simplify call routing management for wholesale carriers. Axelrad said at the time many carriers were complaining that managing increased network complexity was eating into their profits.

“Everybody kept saying, ‘you know I have a hard time managing all this routing,” he said. “So we sought to change the paradigm on how these provider route calls.”

The problem was that, up until then, propagating call routing tables to switches was a mostly manual process that took up an enormous amount of resources.

“The way it used to work was, carriers would get all their rates from my suppliers, and they’d have this team of people analyzing them, performing all these incredible calculations on Excel spreadsheets, which would result in the creation of a least cost routing table that they would have to propagate to their switches,” he explained. “And each switch had a different format – some could handle domestic least cost routing while some couldn’t – so, after creating these Least Cost Routing tables they then had to modify them to fit the format of the switchLooking at it holistically, it was a fairly complex process.”

Automating this process was something that was long overdue – but it was unclear why it wasn’t happening in the wholesale market.

“It’s amazing that even in 2006 when we started GCS, that all these carriers were still managing LCR on a manual basis,” Axelrad said. “There was clear frustration – obviously when you look at the macro economic factors – average revenue per minute was rapidly declining, average margin per minute was rapidly declining – so even though minutes were maintaining or marginally increasing, the net was that margins were getting squeezed, and yet they had the same operating costs. So everybody was saying, ‘I really need a solution that will let me eliminate all this overhead, and still squeeze out a profit.’ So we said ‘we can solve this’ and we built what was the first generation of our Dynamic Route Manager.”

According to Mark Delaney, the companies CMO and also a former ITXC alumnus, The Dynamic Route Manager, “changed the call routing paradigm” by moving the routing policies out of the switches – in other words out of the core – and out to the network edge, “where it sits between the business and network management needs of the business.” This frees up the switch from having to store, and constantly query, the routing table, a task which has become more resource intensive, as today’s routing tables can represent up to a million or more lines of code. Instead the Dynamic Route Manager simply tells the switch where to route the call based on the policies which reside in a SQL server that lives on the edge of the network.

Delaney said as a result “the switch actually becomes less intelligent -- because it doesn’t have to manage all these large complicated routing policy files. And by living on the edge like that, it can simultaneously interface to the business side of the carrier organizations, so carriers can make changes to the LCR database in real time, and it doesn’t impact the switch at all – a completely new paradigm whereas before when theyhad to push and propagate these changes to the switch they had to do it on a tightly controlled basis that minimized risk.”

With Dynamic Route Manager, every call is routed based on the best rates, the best quality, customer specifics… whatever policies the operator dictates, not only automatically, but across switches and SBCs from all the major vendors.

“We interoperate with MetaSwith, Sonus and Genband, Sansay, Acme Packet (News - Alert), Stratus – and pretty much every SBC platform on the market today,” Delaney said.

Axelrad highlighted a customer that has Sonus, Excel switches and Genband SBCs deployed in their network – "and with the GCS Dynamic Solutions suite they have taken all the work, all the different processes that support all those platforms, and centralized it in one database. As a result, they eliminated over 90 percent of their overhead –related to LCR creation and management. The GCS Dynamic Solution eliminated all that wasted, unnecessary effort and the risks of human error – all of that was completely eradicated with the GCS Solution.”

This is key for operators because it enables them to negotiate with the vendors they want, but not have to worry about how they’re going to support a mixed switching environment from an operations standpoint.

Axelrad said today’s carriers must start adopting next generation switching solutions if they are to remain competitive and in business. The traditional OSS/BSS tools of the not-so-distant past no longer cut it.

“VoIP has enabled all carriers to interconnect in almost real time – long gone are the days of 30-day to 60-day provisioning cycles -- having to run cable, having to go to meet me rooms, and having to do all that arcane, expensive and time consuming stuff. Now it’s just, give me your IP address and I’ll enter it into my softswitch or session border controller,” he said. “As a result of that, carriers have gone from managing ten, 12 or 20 suppliers to managing hundreds of suppliers. But the challenge is the sheer volume of data that you have to support and intelligently manage – the tools that were available to carriers in the past several years were unable to keep up with the pace of the market evolution. They relied too much on individuals, and given the speed at which the market moves, the number of suppliers and amount of traffic, it's simply impossible to have human beings involved in the processing of this data. The GCS Dynamic Solutions suite turns these people into business policy managers which allows them to be ten times more effective than they were previously.”

Recently GCS started offering its routing and billing/rating solutions for wholesale carriers on the Software as a Service basis. Axelrad said most customers are using the SaaS (News - Alert) version to either trial the software for a period of time or they are in the process of migrating to next gen services and don’t want to commit to an on premises solution as of yet.

“It has worked out incredibly well for some of our Tier 3 and Tier 4 providers who do not want to commit money to infrastructure,” he said, adding that smaller carriers using mixed, hybrid environments in particular like the SaaS option – “they use it as a bridge to IP – and some even stay with it.”

He said about 25 percent of GCS’ business is now SaaS, but that figure is expected to grow: “We’ve probably tripled our hosted business in these past six months,” he said.

GCS boasts 60+ customers, consisting mostly of Tier 4 and Tier 3 operators, but also including some Tier 2 operators including Vonage (News - Alert), One Communications and KDDI. Axelrad reports that the company’s solution set is getting increased attention from Tier 1 operators as well, now that its platform has been around for a while, and thus has become “battle hardened.”

“We’re now getting higher and higher up market, because we have this end-to-end solution and it all works natively together,” he said. “On top of that, we’re carrier guys, so we know exactly what you need when you run this business – we know where all the hidden issues lie, all the challenges carriers face, and how to compete in this industry. So when we provide our support paradigm with that, it has been no less than, ‘wow these guys have a great product and they are solving 90 percent of my back office issues.’”

To learn more about GCS’ Dynamic Route Manager, Dynamic Rate Manager and Professional Services, click here.