Case Study:

MERS Goodwill Migrates to SIP Trunking with TelcoBridges’ ProSBC

Background

MERS Goodwill of Missouri is a non-profit agency focused on career counseling, skills training, education, literacy programs and employment services.  Having celebrated their 100th anniversary of serving the community, the agency today manages 107 locations consisting of 44 stores, 60 employment training centers and three adult high schools. Telecommunications services for the agency are provided by a mix of internally managed IP-PBX systems from a variety of vendors including Cisco Call Manager.

“…we needed to find an SBC with the means to route individual DIDs to our remote offices and employees”

“We tried some of the popular open source solutions and found them too difficult to configure for our application”

—Nathan Sides, Director of Network Administration at MERS Goodwill

Challenges

In an effort to reduce operating costs, the agency decided to replace a number of legacy PRI trunks with SIP trunks from a major operator at their primary site. As noted by Nathan Sides, MERS Goodwill Director of Network Administration, “to reduce costs, the new SIP trunking services were delivered to our main office – this meant we needed to find an SBC with the means to route individual DIDs to our remote offices and employees.”

As a non-profit agency the operational cost of a solution would be an important part of the decision.  “We must maintain and manage all our own infrastructure”.

In order to manage the system and implement adds, moves, and changes, Nathan and his team would need to make their own dial plan modifications, without learning complex coding script languages. “We tried some of the popular open source solutions and found them too difficult to configure for our application”.

As with any telephony infrastructure, MERS Goodwill needs a highly reliable solution to communicate with their customers, clients and employees.

“We feel confident that we can manage ProSBC going forward, allowing us to add users over time”

Solution

MERS Goodwill of MO chose TelcoBridges’ ProSBC, a software-based session border controller, implemented on an Intel-based server in their data center. The SIP Trunks from the major operator are terminated at the SBC, where routing tables redirect incoming calls to the appropriate facility.

Using the easy to manage ProSBC GUI, Nathan and his team can manage the SBC on their own, implementing routing adds, moves and changes as the organization grows and changes. “We feel confident that we can manage ProSBC going forward, allowing us to add users over time” noted Nathan.

Addressing the reliability requirements, Nathan notes “ProSBC has been very stable”, and with each ProSBC subscription including an optional +1 license, supporting High Availability with No-Loss-of-Service features is also possible.

At $1/session/year subscription, ProSBC is very affordable, keeping operating costs low for the agency, which allows them to concentrate on funding core employment training programs.

“ProSBC has been very stable”

“I now feel comfortable that we could make the changes needed going forward…ProSBC is what we needed at the right price”

Results

With the help of the TelcoBridges’ Support team, the MERS Goodwill implementation is now in production. Says Nathan, as of now, “we’ve completed our deployment, eliminating the PRI trunks and handling all our calling on ProSBC”.

With the user friendly ProSBC Web Portal, Nathan and his team can manage adds, moves and changes, adding that “I now feel comfortable that we could make the changes needed going forward”.

When asked about the value of ProSBC, Nathan indicated that ProSBC was “What we needed at the right price”.