Leveraging Open Source SIP to Deliver Cost Effective VoIP

Founded in 1929, Sterling National Bank provides a wide range of products and services, including commercial lending, assetbased financing, factoring/accounts receivable management, international trade financing, commercial and residential mortgage lending, equipment leasing, trust and estate administration, and investment management services. So, when Eliot Robinson, CIO of Sterling National Bank, wanted a more cost effective alternative to its legacy Western Electric PBX and Centrex solutions to communicate between branch offices, the back office operations center, and the disaster recovery office, they looked for something reliable.

“The industry has standardized on SIP for IP communications, so we knew we needed a standardsbased SIP solution to achieve our goals,” said Robinson. “We looked at a variety of systems and there were no pure SIP solutions – phone, server and gateway. Pingtel’s SIP-based solution was the obvious choice as the linchpin of our new system as it provided the most options for end points given its native SIP architecture and interoperability focus.” The other main driver was economics as Sterling’s recognized a significant and rapid return on their capital investment using the Pingtel solution. Robinson estimates that including service provider access charges, Sterling will be able to lower their average monthly costs for telephony services by two-thirds once it replaces all the legacy phones. Sterling uses Cisco SIP phones, connected to an IBM server (with Red Hat Linux) running Pingtel’s SIPxchange PBX, and a Cisco media gateway to connect to the PSTN. Sterling expects to expand its production environment to 700 seats quickly as the economics clearly favor this approach. “One huge advantage to the Pingtel solution is that it is compatible with a variety of phones – Polycom, Cisco, GrandStream, and more, so Sterling has the ability to use whatever SIP phone that meets SIP standards and has been approved by Pingtel to work with Pingtel’s SIPxchange. ”

Once Sterling has the system fully implemented, Robinson likes the fact that their options, in terms of endpoints, go up dramatically. In tests done to date, he’s found consistent voice quality no matter the endpoint. In the future, Sterling plans to integrate the system with more of its computer systems. For example, if a customer went to Sterling’s Web site, they could use the system to set up a voice chat (IP call) to answer questions directly from their computer.

Why Open Source?
An open source business model means Sterling does not have to worry about whether a particular software vendor is going to be around to service the source code. For Robinson, it’s kind of insurance policy. “Pingtel is important because they supply support, configuration tools and training. We want to have the flexibility to add phones as we see fit and we don’t have to worry about the licensing every time we add another phone as we do with other business models,” he added.

Partnering for Success
Given Sterling’s business, the bank had specific needs outside a typical configuration so having a partner that could provide the requisite professional services was critical to Robinson and his team at Sterling. “We asked Pingtel to provide guidance in how to set up a back up server in case we had a hardware failure and the professional services team more than exceeded our expectations,” said Robinson. Pingtel’s professional services team also helped Sterling set up a sophisticated ACD-like functionality for some of the bank’s help desks.

The Bottom Line
According to Robinson, Pingtel combined the three things Sterling needed to move forward with this type of solution: a low-risk, easy-to-use SIP-based system, a fundamentally better economical model for Sterling’s telephony needs and a technically savvy professional services team that helped tailor the application to meet its specific needs.