Ordering broadband circuits from various local exchange carriers throughout the country can be a frightful experience even for other service providers — more so for an electronic security company. So Interface Security Systems LLC turned to business process outsourcer, Vertek, to end its nightmare and manage the complex fulfillment process.
Interface Security Systems (ISS) is a nationwide provider of electronic security solutions, managed broadband and IP security applications. It tried to do it all in the beginning, provide the security services it was expert at providing as well as order and provision the broadband circuits for its multi-location, sometimes multi-state enterprise customers. They were good at both, but not good enough on the broadband fulfillment side.
“Organizations, even with many sites, expect to get service installed within 30 to 45 days,” said Jeffrey Frye, director of corporate sales and marketing at ISS. But due to its own growing business, circuits at its customers’ premises were taking closer to 60 to 75 days to turn up.
“We were faced with a scaling problem. We had customers demanding circuits in many places and had reached a breaking point in our organization with our ability to provision circuits,” Frye said.
So the company signed an agreement with Vertek to order, track, and manage the installation and testing all of the telephony circuits required to deliver Interface’s remote alarm monitoring and managed IP services. Vertek delivers the physical circuits so ISS can dispatch its technicians to customer locations and install the cameras and other security and IP data equipment to enable remote monitoring of customers from the ISS Secure Operations Center.
Vertek deals with the complexity and multitude of processes necessary to order facilities from numerous network providers. Some customers have thousands of locations across the U.S. that use a variety of broadband access technologies: DSL, cable broadband, DS1s and wireless broadband. Vertek employs its On-Demand Engineering (VODE) platform to facilitate the outsourcing of the business processes involved in ordering and provisioning these circuits.
“Interface Security isn’t in the telecom business and the ordering process for them has been complex and tedious,” said Al Brisard, vice president of sales and business development at Vertek. “But it’s what we do all day long for a number of carriers.”