Background
NEO-ONE (www.neo-one.fr), a subsidiary of the EQUADEX Group, is an alternative telecommunications operator in France serving small businesses and SMEs that require a guarantee of optimized and uninterrupted service for their business. NEO-ONE is one of the few service providers in France that can deliver a complete geo-redundant, cloud-based Unified Communications solution.
NEO-ONE offers advanced business services based on IP telephony (VoIP) and SIP trunk solutions, where the integration of voice and data traffic in a single data network is a major challenge. The aim is to eliminate the need for traditional telephony lines thereby rationalizing costs. However, offering a reliable cloud-based unified communications and telephony solution is a challenge that NEO-ONE confronts on a daily basis.
Many enterprises are adopting Microsoft Lync as a unified communications platform, with the extensive advantages that Lync can offer to their organization. To ensure full interoperability between the Microsoft Lync solution and SIP trunks, enterprises must deploy qualified protocol conversion systems such as Enterprise Session Border Controllers (E-SBC). Usually, an enterprise wishing to combine Microsoft’s unified communications solution with a VoIP infrastructure would need to invest in expensive equipment requiring costly maintenance and support which many enterprises do not have the skills to provide inhouse.
NEO-ONE was therefore looking for an economical, centralized solution that would combine its performance and high availability requirements to enable its Lync customers to take advantage of its Lync-compatible routing and telephony service. The solution would need to offer full interoperability with the customers’ on-premises Lync deployments, while ensuring high levels of security, reliability and performance.
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Certified Lync compatibility
Reliable communications with certified Lync compatibility
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Seamless connectivity
Seamless connectivity between Lync deployments and SIP trunking infrastructure
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Security and redundancy
High availability solution with enhanced security and redundancy
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Customer benefits
Customers benefit from a cloud-based solution
"The AudioCodes solution has allowed us to formulate a simple turnkey offering for customers looking to implement the Enterprise Voice element in Lync environments."
Solution
The platform selected by NEO-ONE to act as interface between its customers’ Lync platforms and its SIP trunking solution was AudioCodes Mediant 4000 SBC.
AudioCodes Mediant 4000 is a medium density Session Border Controller which acts as the demarcation point between enterprise VoIP networks and the SIP trunking service provider domain, offering protocol mediation between the different SIP implementations. Mediant 4000 is also fully qualified for use with Lync Server 2010 and Lync Server 2013. In NEO-ONE’s case, this means that customers can be sure of full compatibility with their Microsoft Lync unified communications environments.
Two of Mediant 4000’s characteristics that were particularly important considerations in NEO-ONE’s selection of the product were:
- The capacity to convert the TCP transport protocol used in the Lync environment to the UDP protocol used in NEO-ONE’s Business Trunking network.
- The ability to support active/passive redundancy between two geographically distinct sites.
A major prerequisite for NEO-ONE was the high availability of this service offering. NEO-ONE was able to achieve this by deploying two AudioCodes E-SBCs in a redundant configuration at its datacenters in Paris and Toulouse. The VoIP and unified communications system is connected through a special fiber-optic link, dimensioned to the service’s simultaneous communication needs, guaranteeing total end-to-end control of the quality of the communication provided by NEO-ONE.
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Mediant 4000 SBC
AudioCodes Mediant 4000は、大企業やサービスプロバイダーでの展開向けのアクセスSBCとして設計されたセッションボーダーコントローラ（SBC）です。
詳細
Results
Following a process of rigorous testing and validation, NEO-ONE selected the AudioCodes E-SBC Mediant 4000 SBC appliances as the basis of its solution to enable the provisioning of voice channels in Lync-compatible SIP trunk form. Customers of the services are able to benefit from the feature-rich functionality offered by the unified communications solution, the cost-efficiency ratio of NEO-ONE’s data convergence and a highly available, geo-redundant infrastructure. The customer thus acquires a ready-to-use and secure system while saving time, cutting out the need for excessive hardware and training costs and reducing complexity with optimized management.
"Our partnership with AudioCodes was dictated by their extensive experience and know-how in VoIP environments at a global level. Their Mediant 4000 product was the only solution on the market that could meet our technical requirements," explained Thierry Durieux, Technical Director at NEO-ONE.
"The AudioCodes solution has allowed us to formulate a simple, turnkey offering for customers looking to implement the Enterprise Voice element in Lync environments," he continued. "By offering a centralized, hosted SBC solution, our customers can hook up to our SIP trunking service rapidly with the assurance of full interoperability, extensive security, and high availability."
