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VOIPo, a provider of fully featured phone service to cord cutters and small businesses, was facing challenges in scaling up to accommodate big customer orders and getting real-time insight on phone number ports. The process of manual phone number ports was cumbersome and required a series of authorization forms for each number. Support agents had to be in frequent contact with the customer to process an order. When number ports failed, it posed an even bigger challenge for a small support staff. VOIPo needed more features than the basic APIs other companies were offering to manage phone numbers.

TDS Telecom, the seventh largest local exchange telephone company in the U.S, was facing a challenge of expanding its services beyond its traditional coverage area due to growing demand. The company had a diverse base of business and consumer customers and was looking to grow its market through acquisitions, primarily of cable companies. However, to extend its bundled consumer services and business offerings beyond its existing local exchange carrier (CLEC) footprint, TDS required a network partner with nationwide coverage. This partner would not only need to provide network availability, but also 911 service and automation tools that would make the expansion process seamless.

Truly Wireless, a fast-growing enterprise phone system app, was facing a challenge with its then-current communications API provider. The provider was not able to deliver the network quality and reliability needed to serve Truly Wireless's growing customer base. For an enterprise-grade phone system to obtain new users, it must deliver a nearly flawless degree of call reliability and quality. However, during its testing process with a prospective customer, Truly found that it was not able to obtain a high percentage of connected calls with major wireless carriers using its legacy providers.

ProviderTech, a rapidly growing startup, recognized a gap in patient engagement as health care delivery systems increased in size. The ability to communicate effectively with patients suffered. However, the rapid expansion and adoption of mobile technology created a unique opportunity to connect people with health care providers. ProviderTech developed a system that automatically creates and sends customized messages to patients to address individual health conditions. As its client base continued to grow, the team realized it needed a more robust and sustainable back-end platform to power the core SMS communications. ProviderTech needed the ability to provision numbers instantly paired with sufficient flexibility with its telecommunications partners to service its clients and meet business requirements.

Purple, a company providing communication services for the deaf or hard of hearing, was faced with a challenge when the FCC issued a mandate for telephone relay services (TRS). This mandate required the use of a text telephone (TTY) or an Internet-connected PC to enable communication between hearing and non-hearing individuals over a telephone. Purple needed a partner to help them meet this FCC mandate. They required a service provider with a robust offering and the widest possible footprint. After an extensive review of the companies in the industry, Purple selected Bandwidth.

ParentSquare, a web-based platform for school-to-home communication, faced a challenge in ensuring the delivery of important messages to every parent. The company's clients, school districts nationwide, were struggling to reach parents and guardians who were less tech-savvy or not mobile-connected. These individuals often missed communications because they were not read in time or completely overlooked. ParentSquare needed a partner that could help it quickly and easily integrate voice notifications into its offering and help school districts increase their capacity for communicating with every parent, at any time of day. Another requirement was that the school districts could send out voice notifications from the school’s active and established phone numbers.

QWASI’s AIM User Interface is a cloud-based platform that provides enterprises with one view of all customer engagement. However, the company was looking for a partner that would help it enable voice and IVR features through the AIM platform. Adding voice to the omnichannel platform would mean that QWASI’s clients’ customers would be able to receive phone call notifications and customize an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) experience for collecting input from those phone calls. Speed to market is paramount to everything about QWASI’s business model and platform, and implementing voice and IVR would be no different. As a growing startup with deep expertise in software development and integration, QWASI needed a partner that could do the heavy lifting of telecom.

WhatConverts, a call lead tracking company, was previously using another CPaaS (communications platform as a service) provider before switching to Bandwidth in 2015. The company was seeking a cost-effective solution that could provide a robust API for issuing customer phone numbers in their local area codes. The API needed to be dynamic enough to work with their existing software and simple enough to issue new phone numbers without confusion. Customers desired local area codes to match their places of business, enhancing their local presence.

HTC, Inc., the nation’s largest telecommunications cooperative, was faced with a challenge when it partnered with Lumbee River Electric Membership Corporation (LREMC) to deliver voice services over a new fiber network in North Carolina. The problem was that HTC didn’t have a voice coverage footprint in the areas where the new fiber network had been built. To deliver on LREMC’s requirements, HTC was faced with the classic conundrum in telecommunications deployment—to build or to buy. HTC could have paid thousands of dollars and dedicated its workforce to securing licenses and facilities in the new markets, which would have taken a year or more. Alternatively, the company could partner with a CLEC provider and pay significantly less to deploy voice services across the new network.

Fusion, a company that provides hosted phone systems to corporate, government, and military customers, was in need of a partner to deliver FCC-compliant E9-1-1 for VoIP. They were dissatisfied with other alternatives and required a provider that was interested in and capable of supporting 9-1-1 for their unique customer base. The challenge was to find a solution that was FCC compliant for Basic, Enhanced, and Next Generation 9-1-1 functionality and could accommodate Fusion's provisioning cycles.

Spirit Telecom, a company that prides itself in providing reliable, flexible, and responsive solutions to their customers on their private fiber-based network, had become dissatisfied with their existing 9-1-1 partner. They were in search of a more reliable and cost-effective alternative. The company was looking for a solution that could seamlessly integrate with their systems, provide real-time address validation against multiple data sources, auto-correction, and managed ALI database population. They also wanted a solution that could reduce the time required for moves, adds, changes, and migrating records from one service to the other.

The company’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) is promoting digital transformation initiatives to improve performance of the technologies used to efficiently deliver financial transactions for customers. These projects include undertaking lift-and-shift application workload migrations to software-defined networking (SDN) and hybrid cloud platforms. One IT team is overseeing implementation of several next-wave digital transformation projects, including updating the trading platform used by brokers in their client service centers to an intelligent, voice-based turret solution that includes Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking and IT connectivity technology. While the company was widely using NETSCOUT for monitoring and Help Desk ticket troubleshooting across the business, the IT team responsible for the new trading platform did not use nGeniusONE. They instead relied on another vendor’s analytics and data sources, which had IT-perceived limitations regarding Unified Communications & Collaborations (UC&C) analytics and platform security.

The agency’s data and voice network runs in a 4G environment managed by a leading telecommunications system integrator (SI). This network supports hundreds of government teams and users, and the SI regards this community as equivalent to mobile subscribers. With the security challenges in today’s geopolitical climate, the communications integrity required for effective national defensive activities is of utmost importance. As a result, the agency approached a select few industry vendors regarding viable solutions for their mobile network and user monitoring needs. Monitoring call quality from the subscriber’s perspective was atop this list. Any call quality impairments in this military environment could jeopardize the agency’s mission, assets, and the very citizens of this country. As a result, the agency wanted to enhance monitoring of their 4G mobile network performance to validate the service responsiveness and integrity provided by their SI. The agency specifically wanted to monitor LTE/EPC Network interfaces (e.g., S1MME, S5/S8, S10, and S11) and IMS/ VoIP/VoLTE protocols (e.g., Cx, IMS, IMS DNS, SIP, Rx, and RTP). Only then would they be able to visualize the service quality being provided by their SI to their government users. As part of their overall requirements, the agency also identified a need to uncover and analyze specific calls that failed to deliver required performance. Specifically, they wanted the ability to quickly focus and analyze calls with unique parameters, including merging calls for call correlation. While the government recognized the importance of this project, the relatively small user base and highly focused scope meant there was a desire to acquire the best technical solution in the most efficient, economical way.

The U.S. Government agency was facing several challenges. They were looking to upgrade their network bandwidth to support faster 10G and 40G network speeds, which they anticipated would help avoid the adverse performance they occasionally experienced with some of their critical applications. They were also planning to roll out a next-generation Network Operations Center (NOC) to better support the upgraded network, as well as the applications, services, and UC solutions running across that network. Additionally, they wanted to improve Data Center redundancy and disaster recovery prevention by enhancing network visibility at a secondary Data Center that had historically functioned as a “warm” standby site. The agency’s Security Operations (SecOps) team was also engaged in strategic efforts designed to enhance organizational safeguards. They were interested in enhancing their Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and Vulnerability Scanning solutions by gaining access to high-value network packet traffic that would improve the efficiency of security forensics activities.

The global Contact Center Services Provider (CCSP) was expanding its business and increasing the number of company-owned Data Center and Call Center locations in their network. They also started using regional third-party co-location facilities to quickly establish Contact Center platforms for new clients. As part of their ongoing business expansion, the company’s Infrastructure Solutions Architecture (ISA) team wanted to standardize on a bill of materials (BOM) for new Contact Center clients. They wanted to extend this BOM concept to standardize on the visibility and monitoring platform they were using for these new Contact Center clients. The team had earlier realized quick advancements in improving voice infrastructure performance for previous Call Center clients by using a production-level NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform for Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C), network, and application performance management.

The global Contact Center Services Provider (CCSP) was tasked with managing a customer-facing, next-generation Cisco Webex platform for a government agency. The agency was transitioning their Unified Communications (UC) Call Center technology platform to an outsourced service model due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic had caused an increase in unemployed workers and those transitioning to remote office environments, escalating the need to provide citizens with uninterrupted remote access to this critical federal government support program. The CCSP had to establish this new contact center platform in an unusually short timeframe.

The business process outsourcer (BPO) and a leading Unified Communications (UC) technology provider had a strategic partnership to bundle their voice and video technology solutions as part of Contact Center services builds hosted by the BPO on behalf of their customers. However, the growing cloud-based Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution marketplace presented a new challenge. Many commercial and government organizations are moving to such CCaaS solutions, as these outsourced Call Center services offer quicker deployment, greater flexibility, and reduced IT operations. The UC company wanted to enter the CCaaS market and expand its business reach. They sought partners capable of reliably hosting CCaaS platforms configured to support large-scale enterprise and government customers with millions of potential annual call center client exchanges, as many as 40,000 concurrent user sessions for each service pod established for individual end customers, a vendor-agnostic approach for real-time monitoring of diverse business applications, and smart visibility solutions that would provide end-to-end views from the BPO contact centers hosting the UC technology to the customers and citizens accessing the CCaaS.

The medical center was facing a lack of visibility into their Epic EHR and Nuance PowerScribe radiology reporting solutions, which was impacting patient care and staff efficiencies. They were also dealing with tool consolidation, multi-vendor management, and operating expense challenges. The IT team was responsible for an increasing number of complex digital clinical applications, including a comprehensive Epic Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, a voice-based Nuance PowerScribe application, and a virtual private network (VPN) and VMware Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment. These services were recognized as business-critical to improving healthcare delivery efficiencies to patients in need, but there were consistent difficulties in monitoring them.

The healthcare provider was undergoing major data center transformations, including upgrades to 40GB core links and VMware virtualized servers. During a recent cut-over back to the primary data center, the organization experienced several performance issues with critical application services, including their EHR application, Epic. Hospital staff had lengthy wait times pulling up patient records they needed, log-ins were delayed, and record uploads were slow. All of this impacted the swift, safe, accurate treatment of the patients, and it even required the IT team to return service access to the back-up data center until they could pinpoint the source of the issues in the primary data center.

The healthcare network was experiencing a dramatic increase in home-based workforce traffic due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This led to quality issues with services through Azure and their telemedicine application, which was experiencing choppy voice and video, as well as losing calls in the middle of sessions. The healthcare network had recently migrated services to carrier neutral facilities (CNF) and had not yet deployed visibility into the three new Equinix locations, making troubleshooting the reported issues both challenging and time-consuming.

The healthcare institution was facing several challenges. Their performance management tool had been end-of-lifed by the vendor, and the IT staff needed a new solution that would meet their current and future requirements. Recent and ongoing data center transformations, including a new data center – Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking (SDN), several new Internet of Things (IoT) projects, and ongoing security initiatives all required sophisticated visibility. The on-campus and remote performance of their Internet Service Provider (ISP) circuits, all of their healthcare and patient-focused applications, including their Cerner Electronic Medical Records (EMR) application and voice over IP (VoIP) services, and their technology initiatives were of utmost importance when considering their next- generation services assurance solution.

The healthcare organization was facing a major challenge in determining the cause of slowdowns reported by doctors, clinicians, physical therapists, and nursing staff when trying to use their electronic medical record (EMR) application. The application is critical as it holds all the information related to their patient’s health, diagnosis, treatment history, medications, etc. The cause of the slowdown could be anywhere – the centralized data center, across the WAN links to the hospitals and clinics, the EMR itself, possibly with the Citrix services, or related due to something in the network at the hospitals or clinics or end-points. The IT staff was also struggling to establish application and network benchmark metrics for the services and communities necessary for understanding what represented normal, good-quality performance. They were also experiencing voice and unified communications (UC) issues, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) failures, and reports from their clinics regarding poor performance from voice and other services.

PropertyRoom.com was created in 1999 to assist law enforcement agencies, who by statute must auction seized, found, and unclaimed personal property at public auction. Instead of conducting the auctions in a parking lot, which was the common practice, shifting to an online service was more convenient for the agencies and bidders alike. As the company has grown, it became necessary to move to a hybrid application hosting environment to assure service delivery to a rapidly expanding national customer base. The AWS application hosting environment was selected for PropertyRoom.com’s web access, application services tier and database tier. After selecting AWS as the Cloud Service Provider of choice, PropertyRoom.com wanted complete visibility into On-Prem and AWS cloud environment to resolve any issue they might encounter during workload migration. Following migration to the hybrid cloud on AWS, DevOps engineering professionals detected that loads on the company’s servers were higher than expected, leading to performance and security concerns. The challenge they faced was in pinpointing the exact root-cause of the problem.

The biotech company was facing high costs and lack of control due to dependence on 3rd party-hosted applications. The decision was made to implement a performance hub project for their hundreds of remote locations. They used Cisco® Secure Agile Exchange (SAE), which enables enterprises to interconnect users to applications quickly and securely by virtualizing the network edge (DMZ) and extending it to colocation centers. All the 3rd party applications, as well as some applications hosted at internal data centers, were brought “in-house” to 10-15 colocation facilities and all the company remote locations will point to these colocations. A key goal of the project was to ensure the SaaS and internal applications were available to end users after the move to the colocation centers. IT knew they needed visibility from the user perspective, to ensure the new approach was working as designed with high-quality application availability and performance.

The customer, a leading supplier of enterprise software solutions, was struggling to keep up with the demand in one of their test labs. They used patch panels to create network topologies specific to each test scenario. However, this method was error-prone and required frequent physical access to the test lab. The patch panels were prone to problems such as connecting a cable to the wrong port, cable failure at the connector, and dirty connectors leading to intermittent problems during testing. The patch panels quickly became disorganized, increasing the likelihood of errors and failures. The test lab was located two floors away from the engineers, resulting in a loss of time for each round trip.

The insurance company had already deployed the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and InfiniStreamNG and vSTREAM data sources, which helped their IT team to address visibility and application performance issues in their Microsoft Azure cloud environment, improve end-user experience with a public-facing Web portal supporting patient and subscriber transactions, and close other network visibility gaps across the business. However, new priorities emerged that shifted attention across this dynamic IT environment. They faced rolling digital transformation projects and the sudden remote workforce transition. They quickly realized virtual environment visibility gaps were impacting applications relying on VMware ESX and Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technologies for high-quality business service delivery. These issues meant IT could not visualize Web-based applications used for claims edit system, contract modeling, automated claims pricing, and automated bundled payments processing. This Web-based application environment additionally included a HIPAA gateway for automated processing of electronic transactions in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also requiring secure processing of personal health information (PHI).

The government agency was undergoing digital transformation projects which included rolling out a cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 service and establishing operations at two Equinix Co-lo data centers. The agency needed additional visibility and real-time monitoring for these new platforms. The IT team was aware that without additional nGenius InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) smart data sources, they would lack real-time monitoring of these new platforms. The ISNG technology would need to support 40G network speeds and provide additional storage for as-needed packet captures and post-incident troubleshooting. The project had a tight schedule.

The company’s acquisition of another agricultural business located continents away offered the commercial benefits of expanded market reach and production capacity. However, the acquisition also presented new information technology (IT) demands that needed to be addressed quickly. For example, the acquired company’s IT operations were managed by Help Desk resources and local technicians unequipped to meet the expanding monitoring demands of this now-global company. Wanting to reduce rather than expand their data center operations footprint, the decision was made migrate the acquired company’s business services into a regional Equinix co-lo facility. While this decision offered efficiencies and cost containment to the company, the Equinix site had not yet been instrumented for real-time monitoring of the transitioning agricultural business services. The parent company needed to assure business and service continuity before, during, and after the data center migration and required visibility and performance analytics to do so.

The railway company was committed to transforming its data center operations. This included plans for implementing Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking (SDN), Cisco Equal-Cost Multi-path Routing (ECMP), introducing VMware ESX virtual servers, and upgrading to 100G network speeds. Alongside this transformation, the company’s data center operations were also transitioning to a hybrid data center environment that would include a new co-location (Co-Lo) facility. While IT leadership was intent on realizing data center modernization efficiencies, they were aware these new architecture boundaries required additional visibility for effective network and application monitoring, as well as reporting and troubleshooting. In short, they needed the same NETSCOUT Smart Visibility sources and real-time analytics performance already established in their current-day data center environment.

BT, a leading provider of communication services and solutions, faced the challenge of securing their global network and services from increasing and complex DDoS attacks. As a Tier 1 service provider, BT had two main objectives in its DDoS defense program: protection of BT networks, services, and infrastructure; and, protection of the networks, services, and businesses of BT customers. To meet these objectives, BT recognized the need to augment their internal security expertise with additional resources and capabilities that allowed them to expand the company’s use of the Arbor solution throughout their core infrastructure and business-critical systems. Understanding the core business, external customer offerings, and the strategic direction of the organization – coupled with a deep knowledge of the threat landscape – were all critical to implementing and delivering a successful DDoS protection service.