Global Convergence Solutions Worth Consideration

By Rich Terhani

This is my first column in NGN Magazine and I am happy to report for this inaugural issue I have some great information on a company which can help you build efficient and cost-savings next-generation networks. To that end, I have had multiple conversations with Neal Axelrad, CEO of Global Convergence Solutions (News - Alert) (GCS) a company which is relatively unknown but employs some very bright and experienced people solving the challenges of the next-gen service provider.

According to Axelrad, 95 percent of the company is comprised of early employees and founders of ITXC which was sold to InfiniRoute Networks – an early VoIP peering company focusing on PSTN to IP conversion. This company was later purchased (in 2006) by Transaction Network Services (TNS (News - Alert)).

Suffice it to say there are few people who have more experience in IP communications – especially from the early days – than the team that saw this transition to multiple IP communications companies and who founded ITXC. Moreover, this team developed some of the first cutting-edge routing and reporting systems.

GCS was founded by the people who decided they wanted more control over their financial destiny and M&A roadmap. They started a professional services company catering to the same service providers they worked with in the past and from there they branched out. The services provided ranged up and down the seven-layer OSI stack and focused on design, implementation and support of carrier network infrastructure.

The company stayed platform-agnostic and over time, customers started to ask for solutions which led to relationships with hardware providers like Sansay (News - Alert), Stratus, NexTone (now Genband) and others. As they worked, they saw that many carriers had needs in the routing, interconnection, and interworking of networks as they were transitioning to next-generation networks.

Other customers consisted of Web/VoIP 2.0 companies who understood the front-end well but needed assistance designing back-end IP-communications networks. In one case they took a system based on Asterisk (News - Alert) and case-hardened it with by adding an SBC as well as media gateways and in the end came up with a system which was much more resilient and able to fend off denial of service and other attacks.

From there, the company became well-versed in providing dynamic routing solutions and this led to product Number One, EZ- LCR, a dynamic lossless Least Cost Routing (LCR) routing engine which acts as middleware between carrier billing systems and VoIP session controllers such as session border controllers and soft-switches, but doesn’t need any custom coding or special synchronization processes. Indeed, EZ-LCR works with any NGN that supports SIP 302 re-direct. Even if you have multiple NGN networks and platforms, you can just point them at EZ-LCR. It can do complex routing across LANs, WANs and the Internet using standard SIP signaling. It even supports failover routing, preference base over-ride routing, Time of Day routing, % routing and batch route blocking.

From there, customers asked for intelligent routing modules which handled dynamic route changes. At this point, product Number Two was born, EZ-QOS. If you are reading carefully and fully-caffeinated you may know (or have guessed) that some or all of the following related products/services are also available: EZ-Reporting, EZ-LNP, EZ-CDR, EZ-Network Control as well as Operational Outsource, NGN Design and Global Network Implementation.

What is the company’s hottest new product? Well, if you realize the company has expertise in open source and SBCs, then you won’t be surprised to hear that a product merging the best of these worlds is in the works. No word yet on how it will compete in terms of features against some of the more established products on the market.

Axelrad explains that Phase Two of the company involves taking software out of the platform and making it more modular and ensuring that customers use the piece-parts they have in their network very well. This software is designed to help carriers ensure that the investments they make can be utilized more efficiently. In other words, they want to ensure that a single purchase such as an SBC makes the most sense and if so, they want to make sure that it integrates most effectively with other network elements. Phase Three takes these services and moves them into the enterprise segment while Phase Four is a new product based on what’s called Managed Communication Application Peering, a centralized application routing and control engine allowing in-house and third-paty applications to move across multiple networks and platforms. The goal of this solution is to allow companies to communicate more effectively with suppliers, customers and internally on a SaaS (News - Alert) basis.

My two conversations with Axelrad encompassed the credit/housing/Wall Street crisis and on my second call he mentioned to me that carriers are now looking to his company to help them focus on cost savings as much as revenue generation.

In addition, he tells me that quite often service providers use his company’s services to better interconnect the disparate solutions they have in their networks – allowing them for example to better and more holistically manage multiple endpoints and platforms. This is roughly analogous to the former activities of Genesys (News - Alert) Labs – now part of Alcatel-Lucent but first begun over a decade ago to provide middleware in call centers. Back then, Genesys enabled some of the first bridges from disparate dialer and ACD platforms.

GCS has managed to get to their enviable position without funding and is looking for its first round. I am impressed with what I hear from GCS. The company’s aim is to help operators better utilize their current network infrastructure. As long as carriers think cost-savings and/or new revenue generation is important, they’ll inevitably gravitate to the good value provided by GCS’ ability to enable more efficient NGNs to be built.

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