Avaya

IP Telephony Management System Automates Service Configuration

Headquartered in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, with 17,000 employees, Avaya is a global provider of business communications applications, systems, and services. To manage all of the hardware and software in an enterprise IP telephony network, Avaya created an application in 2005 called the Hosted Solution Element Manager (HSEM), which it built using the Microsoft® .NET Framework 1.1. To make the HSEM more efficient and easier to manage, Avaya upgraded the HSEM using the Windows® Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation functionality in the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0. The result is key HSEM functions that run automatically, without manual operation. Some operations run a hundred times faster in the new version, and the performance gains mean less costly, more reliable operations for Avaya’s customers.

Situation

With its origins in the legendary Bell Labs, Avaya is a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems, and services. Created in 2000, Avaya offers large-scale IP telephony solutions directly to enterprise customers and through telecommunications service providers.

Windows Communication Foundation allowed us to implement our service-oriented architecture right out of the box. Joe Hofstader, Systems Architect, Avaya

Today’s enterprise customers need communications technology that supports branch offices, telecommuters, call centers, and customer service operations around the globe, around the clock as well as a workforce that needs mobile access to voice and data services from any possible location. In this rapidly evolving environment, Avaya serves telecommunications service providers by providing the equipment and software they need to serve business customers.

To serve telecommunications service providers in this intensely competitive environment, Avaya created an application called the Hosted Solution Element Manager (HSEM). HSEM offers a central management point for phone company employees to tailor voice services to a customer’s specific requests, whether it’s adding new phone lines for a call center in another country or setting up ways to reduce the time to make changes to an existing phone line.

“An Avaya IP telephony solution is a mixture of processing elements that includes both physical hardware—such as computers or gateways—and software components—such as ‘soft switches’—that run on the hardware,” explains Joe Hofstader, the Systems Architect for the HSEM application. “Managing these complex elements requires configuring and tracking the performance of all the elements that are involved in providing a particular voice service.”

HSEM provides tools that help telephone companies to support their service level agreements by managing service provisioning and administration, providing service usage data, tracking element performance, and safeguarding the security of the solution’s elements.

Avaya built the first version of HSEM, introduced in 2005, using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1. The first version met the needs of its customers, but Avaya knew that newer technology could give them better performance, easier management, and increased security.

Solution

To upgrade HSEM, the HSEM development team re-engineered the application, taking advantage of the new features and capabilities of the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0.

The development team built the new application using Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005, which has built-in support for both the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0 and uses a

Fast Facts
Development time	4 months
Developers	1 architect, 2 systems engineers, 18 developers
Programming language	Microsoft Visual C#
Key Microsoft technology	Microsoft Visual Studio 2005  Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Windows Workflow Founadtion Windows Communication Foundation Web Services Enhancements 3.0

service-oriented architecture to reduce the complexity of creating and deploying distributed applications. In particular, the new solution took advantage of the capabilities of Windows® Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation.

“Windows Communication Foundation allowed us to implement our service-oriented architecture right out of the box,” says Hofstader. “Some of the services in HSEM needed performance improvements, and Windows Communication Foundation allowed us to host those components as Windows services rather than as Web services running under Internet Information Services [IIS].”

Windows Workflow Foundation manages the transactions that need to be performed when a business customer requests a change in voice telephone service. Windows Workflow Foundation simplifies the task of implementing a business process or of changing the business logic of such required modifications.

In addition, Visual Studio 2005 supports Web Services Enhancements 3.0, which allowed the developers to revise HSEM with industry-standard security protocols, such as Web Services Security and Web Services Trust. With this technology, developers can focus on business logic while keeping the underlying Web services communication secure. 

Benefits

The revised HSEM means Avaya can offer telephone service providers a hosted IP telephony solution that provides a faster and more reliable voice telephony management solution. This improves the service that phone companies can offer their customers.

We have the potential for some huge performance gains in managing our IP telephony solutions using the new version…. The same function can now be completed in six milliseconds, a hundred times faster. Joe Hofstader, Systems Architect, Avaya

Faster Performance
Telephone companies using the upgraded HSEM can offer faster, more scalable service to their enterprise-level customers. In HSEM’s previous version, which used Web services hosted in IIS, tests showed that some services took 600 milliseconds to execute a function, such as sending a message acknowledgement or adding a service endpoint. Using Windows Communication Foundation significantly reduced these times, providing faster response times to the end customer.

“We have the potential for some huge performance gains in managing our IP telephony solutions using the new version. When a function is executed on a Windows Communication Foundation service hosted in a Windows service, the same function can now be completed in six milliseconds, a hundred times faster,” Hofstader explains.

That amazingly faster response adds up quickly when a particular transaction that a company wants to complete, such as installing a new endpoint or modifying station features, might entail up to 20 transactions.

Easier Management
HSEM strengthens the interoperability of a telephone service provider’s overall phone system by managing the communication between the provider’s operations support systems and the customer’s specific services. This simplifies the task of managing the overall phone system, both for the telephone service provider and the enterprise customers managing their telecommunications systems.

Reliable Provisioning
In addition to improved speed and easier management, the new version of HSEM automates several tasks that formerly required manual intervention by skilled telephony administrators who understood the details of voice network operations and could properly configure several devices. With the upgraded HSEM, system managers can choose which calling features or administrative changes they want to implement, and HSEM automatically configures the devices required to implement that modification. Windows Workflow Foundation provides the functionality that manages the provisioning process.

“This advance gives system administrators the ability to administer IP telephony services and features using a ‘flow-through’ paradigm,” Hofstader says. “This lets the administrator enter information through a single interface that cascades that information in a more reliable, transactional manner to the devices that make up the service. In the past, a trained technician would be required to configure a service. HSEM automates the capability to make such changes quickly and reliably.”
 

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0
The .NET Framework 3.0 is Microsoft’s managed-code programming model for developing software on the Windows platform. It builds on the .NET Framework 2.0, combining the power of the existing .NET Framework 2.0 application programming interfaces with new technologies for building applications that provide visually stunning user experiences, seamless interoperable communications, and the ability to model a range of business processes. The .NET Framework 3.0 includes Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows CardSpace technologies. It provides a consistent and familiar development experience, bringing new technology to the millions of developers programming in managed code today.

 

For more information about the .NET Framework 3.0, please go to:
www.microsoft.com/netframework  

 

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For more information about Avaya products and services, call (866) 462-8292 or visit the Web site at:
www.avaya.com

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