One of the biggest advantages Savvis enjoys with CenturyLink is the ability to provide a total private cloud solution for its clients. One of our recent opportunities highlights exactly how advantageous this combination of capabilities can be.
Functional Requirements
The client was looking to implement a softswitch on a hosted VMWare instance as a centralized IP-PBX serving a large headquarters site and about a hundred satellite locations with between 3 and 5 phones. Their business application infrastructure was entirely web-based, so there was no pre-existing MPLS network.
Business Drivers
The purpose of this project was to leverage the shared PBX infrastructure to improve call routing such that calls into the satellite phone numbers could overflow to a call center at corporate, and that calls into their main toll-free could be transferred to local sites. Hosted VOIP was not an option because the client wanted to be able to implement custom IVR applications designed for this particular softswitch.
Because existing costs related to communications were relatively low, the requirements had to be met at as low a cost as possible.
Savvis + CenturyLink Solution
Addressing the virtual server requirement was straightforward. Savvis' Cloud Data Center service provided a secure, high-performance infrastructure based on technologies proven to work with the client's softswitch. The three instances required priced out at under $1,200 per month.
Connectivity was going to be the make-or-break component for the project. Because the softswitch was implementing a number of CRM/ERP integration applications, and because management required toll-quality voice, it was clear an MPLS solution was needed.
Because a full-blown MPLS network would likely put the project over budget, we designed the network using CenturyLink's Delta Port product. This service is best thought of as "MPLS light," a low-cost private network product that can include QoS in deployments over 100 nodes. This client fit that mold, and ended up with DS1 speeds at every location for an average cost of around $270.
On top of the competitive satellite node costs, CenturyLink's Data Center Initiative pricing really made the difference. For $780, the client could get a 100M burstable private connection into the Savvis facility housing the Cloud Data Center.
At the end of the day, the client had a comprehensive private cloud solution from a single provider at a per-site average cost of under $310, significantly less expensive than IT originally budgeted.