The importance of Scalability in Interconnect Voice

Okay, time to discuss one of the most oft claimed, but rarely proven, item in the interconnect voice OSS & BSS solution space: Scalability. Scalability is critical, but when, why, and how are not often explained. Here at GCS, we have spent thousands of man-hours figuring out how we can provide scalability. Why so many hours? Because, as it turns out, it is really hard to provide true carrier grade scalability and sustain it.

So, when do you need scalability and why should every carrier make it a central component of their operations?

According to Wikipedia, Scalability is defined as “the capability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work.” That’s a pretty good, albeit simple, definition.

We have refined this definition as follows:

Scalability: The ability of a system or process to handle a growing amount of work without materially extending the time it takes to perform the work.

In our opinion, “without materially extending the time it takes to perform the work”, is a critical component of any truly scalable system or process. It’s easy to add hardware and therefore expand the capacity of a system or process to perform a particular task or set of work. But, to do this in a way that doesn’t materially extend the time to perform that task or set of work, is what is compelling. What we are talking about here is speed. From our perspective, the speed at which a system processes a greater volume of work is just as important as the volume it can process.

Typically, computers work on a traditional FIFO (first in, first out) approach and they complete tasks in that order. With today’s modern technology, we can create parallel processes (multi-threads) that help create simultaneity in processes and that does help improve speed of performance. But here, again, scalability is provided by hardware. Improving the design of the software is what needs to be done, in addition to, the hardware to increase and optimize scalability

Since the inception of the storing of data, companies have employed data scientists and architects who have researched and explored how to improve the speed at which a system operates. Over the past 5 years this has resulted in what we now call “Big Data”. Big Data encapsulates everything about processing massive amounts of information in a data warehouse that can be accessed, processed, and utilized by an application in a reasonable amount of time.

GCS has been leveraging a Big Data solution based on Oracle and Infobright that allows us to process billions of records quickly, yielding enormous insight and performance improvements to all aspects of interconnect voice. Here at GCS, we have helped customers reduce their CDR processing (reporting, analysis, invoicing, etc.) from weeks, to days, to hours, to minutes. Some of our largest customers are generating billions of CDRs per month and they are able to analyze and react to business conditions almost immediately because of the speed and scale of our solution. We designed our software solution that addresses everything from routing to rating, to alarming to quality to invoicing to reporting, to maximize/optimize the hardware resources available so we can handle volume and maintain speed.

In a marketplace like voice services where the transactional volume increases, seemingly disproportionately to other industries, it’s critical to improve network performance, optimize network utility and deliver high quality calls to your customers. GCS, has been at the leading edge of this industry since we started way back in 2006. Our Interconnect voice platform (which we call: Interconnect Command Platform) is a complete OSS/BSS Solution that addresses Least Cost Routing (LCR), Network Management, Vendor Management, retail voice, wholesale voice, international voice , U.S. domestic voice…and everything in between. Our core value proposition to any carrier is our ability to perform all the tasks you need at scale so you never have to worry about your interconnect voice management tool again!

So, the next time you think about your interconnect voice or LCR or Telecom Voice Routing solution, make sure you include speed & scalability in your analysis.