Sonus has been routing VoIP calls internationally and offering media gateways to call center for over 10 years. It has a track record of providing top notch call termination services for the enterprise level call center. While at the international Call Center Show in Miami, TMCnet had an opportunity to sit down with Sonus’s Director of Enterprise Management Mykola Konrad to discuss the direction of the company and some of the fields it’s exploring for expansion.

Sonus has a committed focus to scalable call termination and gateway solutions but has taken a different approach to the way it offers upgrades. In a time when providers are pushing for total replacement of analog and TDM style switches in lieu of SIP, Sonus is looking to meet customers half way. Recently it released a system capable of terminating both TDM and SIP lines allowing TDM users to adopt partial SIP based phone systems without having to rip and replace their entire premise based capabilities.  “This allows people to eventually migrate PRI or TDM trunking systems into the SIP sphere,” Konrad said.

While concentration is likely to remain in the termination and routing market, Konrad also discussed some of the area’s the company is expanding into. “Currently our technology direction is starting to move to call center security,” Konrad said. This is uncharted territory but Sonus has recognized a fundamental need amongst enterprise level call centers to combat frequent auto dialer attacks that tie up valuable resources. While at the expo Sonus debuted some of the intrusion prevention software that it had been working on.

“These could be just hackers, and they just do it just because they can, essentially,” Konrad said. However another major perpetrator in these attacks could be nations profiting from the money provided by dialing 1-800 numbers. “We’re talking fractions of a cent here, but if some guy has a program rigged to ring thousands of lines a minutes, it can add up.” Since 1-800 numbers offer reimbursement to the lines they use in routing a call, money eventually ends back at the telecommunications company where the call originated. Couple a national Teleco willing to give criminals a cut of from these calls and crooks with the tech-savviness to produce autodialers designed for this, and it poses a real issue to call centers using toll free lines.

While the company is only getting started in this arena, the proliferation of piracy and scam based economies mean a market rife with intrusion prevention opportunities. Konrad said, “If someone can find a solution it will likely create a big change in direction.”

Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Chris DiMarco