BusinessWare Solutions in Hutchinson, Minnesota is a provider of network, storage, service, and VoIP (voice over IP) equipment, installation and management services for small to medium sized businesses in the central and southern Minnesota regions. In recent years, it has seen significant growth in customer demand for open standard IP PBX (Internet Protocol private branch exchange) services to reduce costs, increase productivity, enable mobility, and connect branch locations. As these VoIP services have evolved, BusinessWare Solutions has increasingly turned to Sangoma’s SBC (session border control) technology to address its customer VoIP needs.

BusinessWare Solutions in Hutchinson, Minnesota is a provider of network, storage, service, and VoIP (voice over IP) equipment, installation and management services for small to medium sized businesses in the central and southern Minnesota regions. In recent years, it has seen significant growth in customer demand for open standard IP PBX (Internet Protocol private branch exchange) services to reduce costs, increase productivity, enable mobility, and connect branch locations. As these VoIP services have evolved, BusinessWare Solutions has increasingly turned to Sangoma’s SBC (session border control) technology to address its customer VoIP needs.

A large automotive parts warehousing and distribution organization had one main site and eight branches throughout the U.S. Each warehouse operated on a different landline phone system using different carriers; and there was no integration between locations. To address the high cost of communications, the customer decided to switch to a VoIP-based system to reduce voice costs and centralize everything under one bill. This entailed converting all sites to SIP (session initiation protocol) trunking. The central site’s IP PBX had a local gateway to interconnect with the local SIP trunk provider. Each of the branches had SIP phones registered to the central site over a wide area network. Once the customer began deploying VoIP however, it was clear very early in the process that voice quality was going to be an issue. “The main problem was latency in conversations when using the IP-based phones. Latency is something you have to keep in mind when working with VoIP,” Sukraw says. To resolve the latency issue, the choices were to put a phone system in each location, which would drive up costs considerably, or deploy session border controllers (SBC), he explains. (Session border controllers take care of the conversion between protocols, transcoding, threat prevention, resource limiting, and accounting at the edge of VoIP networks of enterprises and carriers.)

With the Sangoma units in place, the customer now has one system and one provider for all of its locations, leading to 40% reduction in voice costs. At the same time, the customer is able to maintain a centralized phone system that is much more convenient and easier to maintain, Sukraw says. Since working on this project, BusinessWare has continued to use Sangoma SBC solutions for its VoIP implementations. “We’ve never had issues with it. Not only is the technology easy to deploy and cost-effective, Sangoma support has been awesome. They don’t just respond with a couple of lines and a link. They take the time to explain things to you. With the ever-growing demand for VoIP services, that counts for a lot.”