Conferencing king InterCall deploys Convedia media servers

Now that West Corporation has helped build its subsidiary, InterCall, into the leading conferencing provider in North America, it will help it upgrade its infrastructure with new media server technology from Convedia.

Convedia announced a comprehensive supply agreement with West Corporation to deploy its CMS-6000 and CMS-1000 Media Servers into InterCall’s development lab to build new IP-based services it hopes to roll out by August to complement its voice-over-IP audio conference and collaboration services.

Conferencing is a sweet spot for Convedia, said Ray Adensamer, senior marketing manager at Convedia. “We are purchased or in deployment with the nine of the top conferencing service providers in North America.”

Adensamer said the InterCall deal is in the company’s top five in terms of value. “We are super excited about this deal because InterCall is the major player now in conferencing and to get their vote of confidence in deploying Convedia is important to us,” he said.

Development teams will build advanced reservationless conferencing and collaboration services that use session initiation protocol (SIP) and media server markup language (MSML) protocols to integrate and control Convedia media servers, which provide the necessary next-generation audio bridging, transcoding, and personalized multimedia mixing capabilities.

Some of the specific services InterCall is looking to provide are those related to conferencing integration with speech technologies. InterCall also is looking to enhance the reliability of the end user experience and develop the ability to manage each participant on a call for things such as volume, gain and background noise.

Future procurements of Convedia media servers will be used to upgrade the existing conferencing bridge infrastructure with an IP-based infrastructure built around Convedia media servers. This will provide InterCall with an IP Multimedia Subsystem-compliant media-processing infrastructure.

“We are certainly cognizant of IMS and where it is going,” said Herb Pyle, senior director of product management and development at InterCall. “We looked at that as one of the determining factors [in picking a vendor.] W are aware IMS has a long way to go, but we are very much concerned that the applications we deliver are IMS-compliant.”

The new infrastructure will help InterCall deliver new features such as multimedia announcements, video ringback tones, video IVR, video-mail, real-time audio and video recording, voice-activated switching and residential video phone applications.

West acquired InterCall in 2002. To build on the company’s organic growth and turn it into the North American market leader Frost & Sullivan says it is, West also bought Sprint’s conferencing business in June 2005, ECI Conference Call Services LLC in December 2004 and a smaller company called ConferenceCall.com. InterCall now handles about 325 million conference minutes per month. Of those minutes, 80% to 85% are reservationless, which means they need to operator assistance 150 million of those minutes run over InterCall’s IP-enabled platform.

“The primary focus of this partnership was to deliver our next gen reservationless conferencing,” Pyle said. “We will continue to support Version 1, but we have a migration plan to move those legacy applications over to Convedia-supported applications. We’re looking at expanding the entire IP platform and looking at providing operator assisted services too.”