BCN Solutions Express has been awarded two 2015 Visionary Spotlight Awards from Beka Publishing and ChannelVision magazine. The company was honored with Best Conferencing Technology for the channel, and for Best Enterprise Deployment for data, Ethernet and converged infrastructure.
The first award was given for BCN Solutions Express’ flexible and partner-ready conferencing portfolio. Channel players can offer the conferencing suite as part of their existing portfolio, or they can white-label the offering to deliver service under their own brands. The conferencing capabilities can also be integrated into the Microsoft Lync unified communications platform, so Lync users gain Web conferencing capabilities along with a consistent user experience and reduced infrastructure complexity. At the same time, they can protect existing desktop investments.
The enterprise deployment meanwhile impressed the judges for the company’s customer-centric approach, and the ability to fulfill its business needs under a tight timeline and complex scope of requirements.
BCN Solutions Express was ultimately able to provide flexibility and cost-savings for a nationally recognized, multilocation health care customer, with the implementation of SIP trunking and MPLS services.
The company has a headquarters with several satellite locations, each with T1 lines and separate data and voice circuits. Some offices also had cable connections to provide Internet service. It needed to implement a secure data center that the satellite offices could connect to, and was looking to transition each location’s communications to a converged infrastructure.
The goal was to implement an Ethernet-based MPLS and SIP trunking solution, with various levels of bandwidth to each location depending on its individual needs. The converged network also needed to support all of the company’s 800-number inbound traffic, and intra-office and external voice calling.
The data center and the headquarters required the most bandwidth, with the latter acting as a backup center in case the data center connectivity goes down. Using an integrated solution, BCN Solutions Express would go on to consolidate five different vendors and solutions down to one, bolstering connectivity, enabling secure file transfer between locations and the data center, and streamlining costs and management.
Because of federal HIPAA requirements for data privacy, the customer had a strict timeline to complete the project. But, Ethernet has a 90-day provisioning interval, and by the time the design was approved, the company would miss the HIPAA deadline.
BCN Solutions Express was able to pivot, and proposed and designed a solution that involved putting into place a temporary network to meet the company’s HIPAA requirements while awaiting the Ethernet—thus avoiding steep penalties.
“Because provisioning intervals for Ethernet are fairly inflexible, we had to be creative in order to fulfill the customer’s needs,” explained BCN Solutions director of engineering Nikos Kontoleon. “We decided to go with a temporary solution, designing it in such a way that the upgrade to the permanent network would be as painless as possible.”
BCN Solutions Express was able to expedite additional bonded T1s to support the new connectivity requirements as a temporary solution. And, it went ahead and installed MPLS routers, so that they were all configured and ready to go when the Ethernet became available. When it was time to upgrade to the permanent network, all that was needed were slight programming changes on the carrier end, making for a painless transition for the customer.
“We’re upfront with our customers,” explained Kontoleon. “We told them the truth: that based on their requirements we couldn’t guarantee a permanent solution by the HIPAA deadline. And then we designed an approach that would avoid penalties while paving the way for a permanent implementation. That’s our role as an advisor—to be upfront and realistic, but to fulfill their needs with the best possible outcome given the individual circumstances.”
He added, “That’s what our customers appreciate: we’re crafting a tailored solution for you based on your business model, not just delivering circuits.”
The deployment is a strong endorsement of BCN Solutions Express’ ability to work with partners to identify the best access solutions to meet customers’ specific data, voice and cloud needs and requirements. It provides design and planning for the customer, offering solutions with quality, scalability and economics at the forefront, and then oversees the implementation until completion.
“We are honored to be awarded not one but two Visionary Spotlight Awards,” said Tom McCrosson, president and CEO at BCN Solutions Express. “Our custom network services give partners infinite options for connectivity to serve their enterprise clients, through relationships that span the globe, and this recognition puts an underscore on that differentiator.”
The inaugural Visionary Spotlight Awards competition was created to honor outstanding products, services and deployments across 24 communications technology categories. Editors from Beka Publishing as well as a panel of judges from research firms and other independent industry resources judged nominations based on a stringent set of evaluation criteria, highlighting overall innovation, as well as future industry impact of the nominated product or service; creativity and feature set differentiation; and ease of use and interoperability.
“We have created the Visionary Spotlight Awards program to highlight the rapid pace of evolution within the communications industry, to give innovators and industry visionaries the opportunity to gain the exposure and recognition that they deserve,” said Berge Kaprelian, president of Beka Publishing. “We are seeing breathtaking changes in both business models and the technology itself. Our team of respected industry veterans has deep experience in both channel/enterprise technology as well as the service provider arena, and I’m looking forward to seeing them bring their critical, independent evaluations to bear in uncovering the most meaningful deployments and product/service design and engineering across our industry today.”
