Thinking Outside of the Sales Box
Hands-on engineering was the entry point to telecommunications for our management and support staff, who have experience in large WAN and LAN network design, soft switch design and implementation, PBX systems, and carrier operations and provisioning. As a result, we excel helping agents tackle the most complex business requirements their customers throw at them.

Our background gives us special expertise in enterprise technologies such as MPLS and SIP, along with the big-picture savvy necessary to mate these technologies with end users' legacy systems. The solutions that emerge work precisely because they have real-world experience backing them up.

This expertise is best illustrated with a few case studies highlighting notable solutions to difficult business problems.

Case Studies

With a major manufacturing facility located in a residential Florida neighborhood, Transitions Optical needed a disaster mitigation plan that addressed their precarious circumstances: no local enterprise-grade facilities, low priority response from the local carrier and utilities, and telecommunications equipment hosted on site. During the hurricane season of 2004 the heavy cost of a disaster-related outage brought their search for a solution to Telephony Partners.

"The first step we took was to mitigate the impact of an outage," Telephony Partners CEO Josh Anderson said. "Their facility had been down for three days at a substantial cost."

A deal with Agility Disaster Recovery to provide a mobile infrastructure was the first step in a plan to migrate their telecommunications needs to secure facilities. With Agility, the company needed only to declare a disaster and trailers with a host of mobile infrastructure showed up within forty-eight hours, keeping their production from slipping to zero.

"Once we had addressed the immediate concerns of an outage shuttering the facility, we worked on developing a long term disaster avoidance solution," said Anderson. "The first hurdle was to convince them the best solution brought their hardware to a hardened hosting facility – in this case a Qwest Cybercenter."

Geography was once again a limiting factor: the time and cost of Qwest building out fiber to Transitions' facility was prohibitive. In the end, Telephony Partners worked with an independent local cable company to lay the fiber, and a deal with Time Warner was negotiated for the carrier to provide the 100MB connection to the Qwest Cybercenter.

"It was a good example of the independent channel being able to address complicated business problems no carrier is equipped to handle," said Anderson. "Multiple carrier, multiple vendor solutions are what we excel at and Transitions Optical gave us the opportunity to really show the breadth of our abilities."

When Seimens Westinghouse came to us, they had a unique set of requirements. Three hundred electrical engineers, working from their trucks and scattered all over the country, needed to upload their data over secure connections to a central office.

"It was clear that there wasn't going to be an off-the-shelf solution for Seimens Westinghouse," says Telephony Partners Rick Valderrama. "It's not unusual for us to come across a situation where cross-carrier solutions are called for, but this was rather extreme. We had to be sure that the laptops issued to the engineers first and foremost established a connection to a Qwest VPN over Sprint PCS, before the computers had the chance to be exposed over the normal Sprint broadband network."

Telephony Partners made sure that the two carriers' technologies meshed and conformed to security restrictions, safely and reliably connecting a far-flung workforce to the security of a Qwest VPN and helping Seimens Westinghouse Generation Services continue their work.

Sometimes a unified data plan covering a customer's entire business isn't possible and a flexible solution that varies by location needs to be assembled. Businesses that face this challenge don't often get sound consultation on their telecommunication choices - in fact, what often is one of the most important decisions a CIO can make becomes another item on the to do list of an overworked manager.

Ed Kane said, "Piece by piece, we put together a package of internet services for ten locations across Texas that incorporated DSL, cable internet, and T-1's so that we could meet the customer's requirements."

"We worked with Netwolves on this account," added Kane, "and they are exactly the kind of flexible business partner that is able to bring an ad hoc approach like this one all the way to turn up."