ANI and Sovernet Remain Eternally Equinox

Taking advantage of a growing hosted IP-PBX market while expanding its Tier 2 base of customers, Equinox Information Systems announced the general availability of its TeleLink 5 mediation and revenue assurance platform this week and some customers taking them up on it.

Nashville-based Equinox is a provider of fraud management, mediation and network analysis software solutions. Its TeleLink 5 platform includes tools that allow carriers to perform a wide range of business-critical mediation, reporting, and revenue assurance activities. It enables service providers to process usage data in any format and link with any number of additional data sets to filter, enrich, correlate, and analyze revenue-impacting information.

“The ability to have real-time visibility into usage data and be able to search and query that data is essential to service providers,” said David West, executive vice president of Equinox.

For example: Long-time Equinox customer ANI Networks, a facilities-based communications company servicing the wholesale long distance and voice market, chose the new TeleLink platform for the reasonable pricing of a comprehensive solution.

“In addition, Equinox's willingness to customize their software to meet our precise needs was another key factor in the decision-making process,” said George Cisler, vice president of Network Services for ANI Networks.

West said Equinox can provide such solutions to customers at a price they can afford because the usual suspects in the field don’t have the means of scaling down the process. “The beauty of our solution is that it is scaleable for 100,000 call records a day or 30 million and we deliver the exact same solution to both carriers. That’s how we continue to stake out our claim on this market niche,” he said.

TeleLink 5 consists of mediation, query tools, network reporting and network analysis modules that can be modified for each customer. It provides automated mediation of usage data for billing, CABS, and other downstream processes. It automates report generation, links usage with billing, rating, routing, and jurisdiction data so service providers know where calls are coming from and going to.

New product features include:

• Real-time alerting of network traffic anomalies
• Robust switch-to-vendor reconciliation and dispute generation
• SS7 to AMA/CDR reconciliation and analysis
• Rate Management and billing for wholesale providers
• Simple, one-step tools for querying usage data from any source

Another user of the TeleLink platform is Sovernet Communications. Sovernet provides Internet and telecom services to residential and business customers throughout New England. It uses TeleLink to manage usage records from its Siemens EWSD and MetaSwitch equipment and support usage analysis for Global Crossing, Verizon, and MCI.

“Equinox software integrates with all of these to provide us with a real-time dashboard of our worldwide usage traffic,” said Brandon Peyton, director of operations at Sovernet Communications.

West said that over the last three quarters, almost half of his customer pipeline is hosted PBX-type companies, which, he said, may have small budgets, but have big needs. “We’d rather start working with these customers when they’re small and grow with them,” he said.

He added that straight billing mediation has become a huge challenge for these providers. “If they can’t get the records to the billing system or have billing systems that charge on a per-transaction basis, they don’t want to send unbillable calls to that system. They want to avoid that,” he said.

The new analysis tool in TeleLink 5 also helps these service providers profile carrier traffic and distinguish it by trunk group in order to more easily and proactively identify changes in that traffic.