Background
Grupo Difare is a group of companies which has boosted the pharmaceutical market in Ecuador since 1984 through its distribution, delivery and development business divisions. Thanks to its distribution vision, Difare has reached more than 3,400 pharmacy sales points across the whole of Ecuador.
As one would expect from a large and distributed organization, over time Grupo Difare had developed a sophisticated voice network set-up to ensure efficient communications both internally and externally. For its regular enterprise calling requirements, the company had selected Cisco Call Manager, while for its customer interactions it was using a Genesys contact center platform. All of its servers were hosted in two fully redundant datacenters to ensure maximum availability. To achieve optimal connectivity with its customers and business partners, Difare had established links with multiple telephony service providers at several locations across Ecuador.
A major challenge arose when Difare decided to move away from traditional TDM based connectivity to the outside world and adopt SIP trunks instead. While this change made a lot of sense from a financial and technical point of view, putting it into practice raised some critical issues. To achieve its goals, the solution that Difare implemented would need to concentrate multiple SIP trunk connections within a single device, provide secure separation between service provider networks and Difare’s own enterprise network, and ensure seamless interoperability between the different VoIP elements on both the service provider and enterprise sides.
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Genesys certified
Solution is certified by Genesys
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Consolidate SIP trunk connections
Concentrate multiple SIP trunk connections within a single device
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Demarcation between networks
Secure separation between service provider and enterprise networks
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Seamless interoperability
Ensure seamless interoperability between the different VoIP elements on both the service provider and enterprise sides
"Thanks to the flexibility and reliability of AudioCodes SBCs we were able to achieve our goals rapidly and cost-effectively."
Solution
Based on its own research and with the help of local integrator Telered (www.telered.ec), Difare selected AudioCodes Mediant 800 session border controllers (SBC) to provide the necessary connectivity between its own internal systems and service provider networks. AudioCodes SBCs are interoperable with virtually any SIP based voice system, including Cisco Call Manager and all those used by Difare’s service provider partners (including Huawei softswitches and Oracle core SBCs). They are also officially certified by Genesys for interoperability with its SIP-based contact center platforms.
There were several other reasons for Difare’s choice of AudioCodes:
- Each AudioCodes SBC is able to manage multiple SIP trunk connections simultaneously with no effect on call quality.
- AudioCodes SBCs offer high levels of call and network security protecting both Difare’s employees’ and its customers’ data.
- AudioCodes SBCs offer scalability from a handful of sessions up to several hundred within the same device.
- AudioCodes SBCs offer advanced features such as number manipulation, complex call routing capabilities and media transcoding.
- AudioCodes SBCs provide crucial call quality monitoring metrics which can be utilized to analyze voice network performance and assist in troubleshooting.
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Mediant 800 SBC
AudioCodes Mediant 800エンタープライズセッションボーダーコントローラー（E-SBC）およびメディアゲートウェイは、中小企業向けに完全な接続ソリューションを提供します。
詳細
Results
AudioCodes’ local team in Ecuador assisted Grupo Difare throught the deployment of their Mediant SBCs from the planning stage right through to commissioning and quality monitoring of the live system. Difare deployed Mediant 800 SBCs at three of its sites enabling local connectivity with several service providers at each location. Thanks to their inherent scalability, Difare’s Mediant SBCs can be upgraded as and when needed to support larger numbers of sessions.
Commenting on the successful deployment, Ramon Escudero, CTO at Difare said, “Here at Difare Group we wanted to integrate all of our telephony systems to guarantee effective and smooth communications both inside and outside the company, while keeping costs under control.”
“Thanks to the flexibility and reliability of AudioCodes SBCs, we were able to achieve our goals rapidly and cost-effectively,” he continued.
