VOSS

At VOSS, we believe that the fulfillment of collaboration services should improve the way that companies communicate. It should provide the security and expose the interfaces to enable thousands of web developers to integrate traditional telephony functions, such as basic click-to-call session control, into their applications.

When it comes to collaboration fulfillment, there are two very important features to perform:

• Enable the rapid creation of new, web-based, collaboration services and applications. This requires the fulfillment platform to work with the physical telecom network functionality at a multitude of levels and occurrences.
• It is very unlikely that any one vendor will be best in class in all areas of collaboration, so enterprises will need to manage multiple vendor applications. The current lack of inter-working between collaboration vendors means that a fulfillment platform is required to manage the sharing and translation of data between vendors.

Here is a typical example of the challenge that a company may face, when performing a typical collaboration administration process today, in an environment that is not supported by a fulfillment engine:

1. An IT administrator in a business location requires a change to their communications system (e.g. a new person has joined, or an existing phone needs replacing). The IT administrator will contact their central service desk (either an internally managed team or a 3rd party managed service provider) to log the request via phone, email, a web portal, or a ticket tracking system.
2. The central service desk receives the change requests. Prior to VOSS, the service desk agent would log the request into a ticketing system and a works order, which might consist of several independent tasks, would be created. This would automatically be passed to a central network operations center, or NOC.
3. The NOC has a team of certified engineers, who are the only people permitted to configure a change on the unified communications infrastructure. An engineer would be assigned the works order and they would directly access the native interfaces of each underlying system to perform the necessary configuration change. In most cases, a single works order will require the engineer to configure several systems to complete a single business process. For example, adding a user might require separate configuration steps for each of:
   • The basic phone service would be configured on the IP-PBX
   • The user may need to be added to various hunt groups or pick-up groups
   • The voicemail service to be configured on the voicemail platform
   • The user’s details would be created on the location’s auto attendant system
   • The user’s details would be created on the location’s attendant console system
   • The user’s details would be created extension mobility
   • The user’s details would be created on the location’s audio conferencing system
   And so on… and this is even before the range of unified communications services, such as unified messaging, instant messaging, presence, web conferencing, video conferencing and fixed-mobile convergence and so on are added to the platform.
4. Once the job had been completed, the ticket would be closed and the customer or user contacted to let them know that the change had been made.

It is not surprising that the above process can take up to five business days to complete. And even then, the chance of error is high, requiring yet another round of works orders to correct the mistake. That is why a simple business change can cost a company over $150.