[Asterisk-Users] RE: Geotel integration with Asterisk

[David Cook]

> Geotel is a company that Cisco bought which provides call control
> across
> geographically dispersed locations.  The simplest application is
> being
> able to query call queue status at another location.  For example, a
> call comes in and can be sent to one of three call center locations.
> Geotel can query each location to see who is the least busy for this
> type of call.  Traditionally it has been VERY expensive.
>
> We provide some primitive Geotel functions in-the-cloud right now.
> For
> example, we can know how many live calls are going to a location
> before
> we send the call.  We can set thresholds (e.g. if a location A has
> over
> 100 concurrent calls send them to location B).  Geotel can
> theoretically
> provide this and carry it further.  I think there is some nice
> enterprise reporting that can come from the Geotel as well.
>
> G.

Their greatest claim to fame is that their peripheral monitor PC sits on
your premise, and connects to your brand "x" pbx to report upstream to
the telco "router" (actually a redundant pair PC) as to the ingoings of
your call centre. The decision to terminate the call on a particular
call centre is done in the telco cloud at the SS7 layer. Each call
centre has 250ms to respond to the correct status or the telco
default-routes the call based on the tables in the NAM.

This feature is self-healing dynamic routing. Proactive rather than
reactive when your call volumes change or a failure takes a centre
offline/snow storm means only half of your agents show up today in one
area of the country, etc.

It allows a "translation" between disparate PBX's to participate in this
scheme so it is a huge boon in mergers/acquisitions. "Just drop this
Peripheral Monitor (pair) in your CC and you are intergrated into our
enterprise".

Actually reporting is one of the weakest links in the Geotel (now Cisco
ICM (Intelligent Call Manager)) platform. Countless clients complain
about this and at their user conference they even came out and admitted
it. The data elements are there, but they don't have a good handle on
how to rationalize them.

Bell Canada, Allstream, MCI and AT&T offer this now that I am aware of.
Yes it is very expensive, but for multi-site high-availability services
like banks, airlines and insurance companies it pays off in spades.

dbc.
--
David Cook