Contact Centers have always depended on reliable communication products that assist their customers to experience a high quality of service and additionally help drive their bottom line. For this reason, the industry has been forging ahead to adapt SIP based VoIP solutions that include support for voice, video, IM and chat.

The reliability and maturity of these SIP based VoIP products including interoperability between contact center solutions from leading vendors along with integrated third party software applications, have become key drivers for the rapid growth of the contact center business.

Some of the reasons for the rapid growth in this market are:

• Solutions that support Hosted Contact Centers and Virtual Contact Centers within a common infrastructure

• The ability to integrate voice, video and data applications in one platform, placing important information at the fingertips of customer service representatives

• A strong suite of proven products that include integrated contact center platforms, security products, application servers, media resources and IP to PSTN and IP to IP Media Gateways

• Protocols like SIP allow contact center agents to use “Presence” information to interactively work with their peers and SME’s and involve the right people to resolve an issue

• Compelling bottom line economics are making this migration a “no brainer” for companies

nCite™ Session Border Controllers

AudioCodes is one of the leading providers of Session Border Controllers (SBCs), delivering real-time control of voice and multimedia across IP networks for carriers, service providers and Contact Center operators. Using the nCite SBCs processing power and unique “deep packet inspection” capabilities, the nCite SBC provides superior reliability, scalability, security and network management capabilities – all in a single chassis.


The nCite SBC provides the following functionality for Contact Center Solutions:

Support for Multiple Voice, Video and IM sessions

The nCite SBC provides seamless support for up to ten SIP sessions between a caller and callee including support for multiple voice, video and chat applications. This allows the operator to maintain dialog with the customer at various levels to provide the most optimal service.

Seamless Transcoding and Media Management

The nCite can provide seamless, best-of-breed transcoding capabilities for Voice and Video traffic within the AudioCodes product family. This traffic can also be monitored, recorded and rate limited based on codec and bandwidth profiles.

SIP Header Manipulation

As with any technology today, allowing operators to add/delete/modify SIP headers to provide better control and flexibility is critical. AudioCodes SBC takes this one step further by providing this modification on a per customer basis allowing hosted Contact Center operators to customize this for each Contact Center on a unique basis.

Security

The nCite SBC uses hardware based DoS and DDoS technology to provide SIP session-based firewall services.

With the virtualization of the Contact Center today, the AudioCodes SBC takes security one step further and provides TLS based security for remote agents. Media encryption can be achieved through the support of SRTP. This secures sessions by encrypting all the packets between the Agent and Contact Center infrastructure for all multimedia SIP sessions.

The nCite SBC enables virtualization of Contact Centers through unique and patented Virtual Domain and Virtual SIP proxy architecture. This also provides a seamless solution for firewall/NAT traversal issues.

CDR’s and SLA Assurance

The AudioCodes SBC collects the most comprehensive CDR information in the industry today. This SBC provides quality of service (QoS) statistics on a per-call basis, allowing carriers and Contact Center operators to enforce SLAs with peering partners. The CDR’s can be streamed to a processing location or can be pushed on a scheduled basis allowing the operator access to the information based on their operational needs.

Unmatched Scalability, Performance and Redundancy

The nCite scales to support 100,000 hosted firewall/NAT sessions on a single chassis, allowing operators to scale the agent base seamlessly. The nCite platform supports up to 21,000 G.711 sessions in a single SBC chassis. It can also support up to 1200 calls-per-second using the nCite Session Manager to support large contact center operations. All the nCite SBC platforms support redundancy architectures that provide sub second failover under full capacity.

Integrated Management System

AudioCodes has developed an extensive element management system to provide configuration, fault, performance, policy, and security management. The EMS easily integrates into existing operational environments with a northbound SNMP interface and an open XML interface. A fully functional CLI is also supported.


Conclusion

Cost savings invariably aid the business case in any type of VoIP deployment. Most VoIP Contact Centers are deployed because of compelling cost savings on both Capex and Opex. However, with SIP maturing as a protocol and the availability of products such as the AudioCodes SBC's along with attractively priced product bundles that include CPE equipment, Media Servers and Media Gateways, the business case becomes stronger. A further major driver is the fact that VoIP-based contact centers enable service providers to offer innovative solutions that include Voice, Video and Instant Messaging using the same platform that is a major differentiator from the traditional “call” centers.