VoIP enabled network helped Oracle Cut its Phone Bills by 80 percent

S.Hariharan, senior vice president of infrastructure support services at Oracle Financial Services Software (OFSS) knew he had a job on his hands. He embarked on a painstaking journey of revamping the operational facilities and bringing in newer technologies. The need to have zero downtime and minimal business disruptions during the entire overhauling process was imperative. But that made the task even more demanding and onerous.

A detailed study of the existing network infrastructure was undertaken to understand the call volumes and patterns. The IT team designed the VoIP architecture, ran proofof- concepts and tested various call volume tools. The detailed study and the trend analyses helped the IT team in designing PBX migration roadmap, VoIP trunks and bandwidth requirements. To cut costs on migration of PBXs to the newer VoIP ecosystem, the existing PBXs were VoIP-enabled by software upgrades. Using logical partitioning (a subset of computer hardware resources, virtualized as a separate computer) the existing fleet of PBXs was leveraged to route both VoIP and PSTN calls across the enterprise.

The revamped infrastructure went live in June 2007. Hariharan and his team proactively accounted various roadblocks that could have possibly cropped up during the entire phased deployment cycle. Redundancy was one aspect that stood out like a sore thumb. In addition to the three carriers being roped in to check redundancy, connectivity between US and India were triple routed. With all his systems in place, Hariharan also had to connect continents and cross oceans. While submarine cable connects were chosen over the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, a third route was devised over satellite. The locations in India networked to US through a direct route, another routing through Singapore and the third going through Europe.

On the IT infrastructure side, virtualized environment riding on VMWare tools was brought in. A number of underutilized servers across three distinct datacenters in Mumbai were collapsed into one box sitting at the new, consolidated datacenter. Once the projects were over, the virtualized setup was reused and the resources were allocated to other projects in the pipeline. This has naturally led to substantial savings in terms of procurement of systems, real estate space, and reduced power consumption.

The project, very evidently, brought in more rewards than one. The VoIP phones ran on POE (power over Ethernet) at the office locations. This eliminated the need to run additional power cabling to the instruments. It also helped the enterprise to significantly reduce power usage.

The Person Behind It

S.Hariharan

Sr. VP Infrastructure Support Services, OFSS

Though we can’t put a number to the rise in productivity, we’re seeing better performance and more user satisfaction.

V.Srinivasan

chief of staff and corporate development at OFSS.

We had to maintain global connects among our locations. This stressed our endeavours to keep a tab on costs, and improve user productivity at the same time.