Where are the Cloud Media Servers?

Media servers are really useful things as Unwieldy Systems Inc. will tell you, but you already knew that, right. If you’re a telecommunication service provider, an equipment manufacturer, a solution developer or even an enterprise customer, you are likely to have a need for a media server and may well be using one, or two or several, somewhere in your network or infrastructure.

In a traditional telephony environment, media servers are used for functions such as network announcements and voicemail; interactive voice response (in many, diverse scenarios); the IMS Media Resource Function; audio conferencing; caller ring tones; and transcoding.

Media servers operate in a client-server relationship, where the client is a separate application server [sic] that provides the service (and business e.g., logging and billing) logic. The media server operates as a shared resource, available to multiple applications, with its primary role being to handle requests from the application server to perform media processing on RTP streams. Similarly, multiple media servers can be shared by a single application. Either way, scalability and resilience are readily addressed, with ‘clients’ and servers separately distributable across a wide geography.

BeQuick Software Choose Aculab Cloud as their Next Gen IVR partner

This week we are pleased to share the news that BeQuick are using Aculab Cloud to handle volumes of IVR calls. BeQuick Software delivers an innovative hosted BSS/OSS solution called QuickTel designed and developed for the telecommunications industry and specifically for Prepaid, Postpaid and VoIP service providers.

They were looking for a VoIP solution that was reliable, scalable, flexible and quick to market. But above all would provide a cost effective means to supply a scalable IVR solution to allow their MVNOs’ customers to activate their new phones, check their balance and pay bills.

For telecom network convergence you need to know the old and the new, and the borrowed, and the blue…

There is a saying here in the UK that we use when couples get married, which is that the bride needs to wear:

  ‘something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue’

Whilst writing about what you can see and hear from Aculab if you visit us this week at the Convergence India exhibition in New Delhi, that phrase came to mind. So let's start with what the old and the new mean in relation to effective telecom convergence.

Myths and legends – cloud myths #1

Zeus

Myths and legends make great stories. They can make great movies – if the director is up to it. In more mundane circumstances, they’re often similarly used as a metaphor. In terms of cloud computing, some myths are considered as incontrovertible as the Instructions of Shuruppak, by which is meant – it is tantamount to a fact that this is a myth.

Myth as myth

One of those mythical statements is; “the public cloud is the most inexpensive way to procure IT services.”

Companies who promulgate this style of myth often do so for their own ends and begin by freely conceding that, yes indeed, a characteristic of the public cloud is a relatively inexpensive ‘pay-as-you-use’ model, before proceeding to ‘bust the myth’ – on their terms.

The evolutional path of media processing systems

From hardware based....to software based....to cloud based

Early pioneers in the market initially known as computer telephony took a look at the typical office workstation and decided that efficiencies could be achieved by integrating the two pieces of electronics typically found on workers desks – the telephone and the personal computer. They started with a computer platform, and added a hardware board to it so that the integrated computer system could make and receive phone calls. 
 

The next step was to scale the system so that it was capable of handling tens, hundreds or even thousands of channels and could be centralised and integrated with the office PBX.  To achieve this, it was necessary to have telephony boards with dedicated DSPs to perform the telephony call processing, thus leaving the main processor on the server/PBX free to handle the application. Interfaces at the E1/T1 level to TDM systems and IP connectivity for VoIP deployments were also a necessity. Media processing boards such as Aculab’s Prosody X range were designed with all these requirements in mind, and continue to form the basis of many different types of telephony server. 

What do you need to run a cloud-based telephony application?

What you need to run a cloud-based telephony application: The

 difference between traditional hardware-based and cloud-based

deployments

Ok, you’re sold on the benefits of cloud computing. You understand it means you can take advantage of computing resources that are owned and managed by someone else.  That’s great!  But you want to know what that means in relation to telecommunications, if you need any additional hardware or software, who takes care of the PSTN connection, how you can access the telephony resources in the cloud, how does it compare to the traditional deployment options. In short, you want to know what you need to know, in order to be able to develop and deploy your telephony-based application, whether it’s an IVR, voice-broadcast or conferencing system.  This post intends to answer your questions.