Feature

Provisioning Portals for Success

Unified Comms
A self-service portal has fast become the must have tool for suppliers wanting to attract and retain customers by extending their propositions through extended ‘opening hours’ or just speeding up the delivery mechanisms – the faster you can sell a service the quicker you can get the invoice issued. In this article, John Bennett, CEO of Swoop Datacom Ltd, shares his view on portals today.

The process of preparing and equipping a network to allow it to provide services to its users is critical to service provider’s and reseller success. The provisioning process monitors access rights and privileges to ensure the security of an enterprise's resources and user privacy. It ensures compliance and minimizes the vulnerability of systems to penetration and abuse. Rapid Provisioning is key facilitating the creation of new applications and services while maintaining quality of service, and the need for automation to reduce human resources and error from manual tasks—all with an eye to drive revenue and acquire new customers.

Swoop Datacom has launched ForgeServe to meet this need. It is an End to End IP Device Management solution developed from a background in IP PBX and IP Phones and available on a worldwide basis.

ForgeServe was launched in 2015, developed with input from service providers, SIP telephone manufacturers and SKYPE for business vendors and resellers it is now available through distribution partners locally in 11 countries and supports millions of deployed devices and growing rapidly.

As IP Phones have developed and become increasingly sophisticated, they have become increasingly complex to provision. For resellers and service providers, moving from legacy phone deployment to IP phone deployment can present a number of technology barriers and can result in having to deal with multiple solutions or with a mixture of manual and automated provisioning options. Both of these solutions are inefficient and time consuming. Even when automated provisioning is available, the solutions deployed typically do not provide estate management and leave the reseller or service provider struggling to provide timely maintenance and support in an efficient and cost effective manner.

ForgeServe provides a Single Multi Vendor Pane of Glass view of three key areas of the network.

Provisioning

ForgeServe has the ability to provide true Zero Touch Provisioning. This is achieved using redirection aggregation. So all data regarding the devices is pushed to the device by ForgeServe. Provisioning includes Automatic EDI, customer creation and template allocation creating the provider of the device and the network with quick connections to the relevant call control platforms.

Management

Once the device has been provisioned, ForgeServe provides device lifecycle management. It allows remote in-life device control, devices can be accessed from any location and change requests and firmware upgrades can be managed centrally.

Metrics

Informative network and device level data is automatically collected onsite and can be displayed on any internet connected device in the ForgeServe User Interface. This provides quick and easy access to device data and device control for support and deployment teams.