Park Bench Solutions
VoIP Application Integration in Days Unlocks Data and Enables Business Innovation

Typical VoIP application development for Service Providers usually requires a team of programmers and never-ending support as security patches, updates and new features continuously evolve over time. These large-scale VoIP systems also usually require a team of provisioners to roll out new customers and manage existing ones. Park Bench Solutions, with their extremely powerful REST-ful API platform called ‘odin’—and a suite of optional product modules (included and supported at no additional cost) for multiple unique portals, bulk provisioning, reporting and multi-tenant/multi-version enablement—tackle both of these challenges with ease for anyone leveraging Cisco BroadWorks or their BroadCloud Platform-as-a- Service offering. In a recent interview with the Founder and CEO of Park Bench Solutions, Marc Tribbe, and their Chief Technology Officer, Dusty Doris, we discussed and reviewed their impressive platform and modules all designed to drive real business innovation and drive out unnecessary costs through the strategic use of their API-based solution.

Overview of the Company

Park Bench Solutions is a next-gen software development and services company, built upon tying diverse business applications together through API technology and integrating those business apps into the worldwide leading hosted voice provider: Cisco BroadSoft. Park Bench and their odin platform are powerful allies with Cisco BroadWorks, which serves hundreds of millions of VoIP subscribers all over the world.

Park Bench has been in development for over a decade, and launched the Tampa Florida-based company in 2011. Both Tribbe and Doris have worked in the VoIP space since its general availability to the commercial marketplace over twenty years ago. They recognized the frustration and fundamental need for a better way to get valuable data in and out of these incredibly feature-rich, and therefore complex, VoIP platforms. They also witnessed a need for a much more efficient way to manage VoIP solutions (from the provisioning, application development and ongoing support aspects) once deployed. Something other than the typical answer, that is throwing more and more people at the problems.

“The latest odin platform changes everything for our Service Providers. All the heavy work is already done. Our clients have finally broken that endless cycle of redevelopment, retesting and recertification every time there is a new update, patch, or release in BroadWorks (or on their side for that matter)”, states Tribbe. With over ten years of development perfecting their powerful API and their optional (and apparently free, more on that later) pre-built modules under their belt, and building out a strong network of integration partners that leverage the odin API, and earning customers in 5 continents around the globe...the industry is taking notice.

Innovation and Acceleration Made Simple

BroadSoft regularly offers newer versions of its software to its clients. Having to stay in sync and updated proved troublesome for service providers and their developers, who have their own applications and business processes to worry about. The odin platform seamlessly handles multiple BroadWork’s instances and also version control simultaneously and with a single instance of odin. This ensures that clients will never have to concern themselves about BroadSoft’s updates moving forward. Endless redevelopment becomes a thing of the past. To help service providers, third-party integrators and developers build their own products that interact with the BroadWorks platform, Park Bench built a powerful API and WebHook layer.

This layer of abstraction gives service providers an opportunity to provide rules or conditions related to specific events without directly affecting the underlying BroadWorks platform. Any modification done to the BroadWorks platform is immediately notified to a client’s end-point via a WebHook from odin.

Dusty Doris, Park Bench CTO, states, “A common example is building out a new customer. If you use the standard BroadWorks API (called OCI-P) this action will often take thousands of independent API calls to individually code, develop, test, sometimes re-code, re-develop and repeat. Ultimately roll out to production, and then support and manage. And once it’s finally in production, you have to continuously wash, rinse, and repeat...all the time!”, he laughs. “All of this coding and work can be replaced with one singular API call through odin, and then just one touch point to keep track of moving forward.”, says Doris.

Driving Out Cost

The odin platform not only provides the powerful REST API and WebHook layer to make it simple to integrate applications and data in or out of the phone system with ease, and a tiny fraction of the time to maintain these integrations (compared to direct integration with BroadWorks). The odin platform also includes the following pre-built modules at no additional cost when signing up for an odin platform subscription:

● portal
● provisioning
● bulk
● clone
● multi-tenant
● reporting

This means that Park Bench customers can bring in the odin platform on a project budget for a specific need, and then later deploy any of these pre-built (yet customizable) modules to phase out old applications and old methods at their own pace. Each module can sunset old applications or people processes and end their ongoing cycle of support. The simplicity of not having to maintain sometimes hundreds of thousands of API calls, and people doing the “swivel-chair exercises” as Tribbe puts it, to generate reports from one system and manually enter data into another system, “drives out unnecessary or wasteful costs typically associated with VoIP application management”.

Additionally, many customers are faced with project deadlines to roll out a new portal or provisioning system, or to get off end-of-life products. There are a few specific products that will not be supported much longer at Cisco, and this is “driving tremendous momentum our way” says Tribbe.

Protecting and scaling the investment

“We should focus on one module in more detail, and that is the new multi-tenant module of odin”, says Tribbe. He continues, “This module, previously named ‘wholesale’, still allows Service Providers to instantly create sub instances and uniquely branded tenants for wholesalers or even their large Enterprise customers. But now with Cisco sunsetting previous BroadSoft products along with pushing more cloud-based solutions we recognized we had to quickly expand this module to offer the best solution. Many Service Providers are now faced with tough decisions to either manage multiple instances and versions of BroadWorks, whether it’s driven through growth, acquisitions, or moving and migrating to BroadCloud PaaS2. Enabling odin multi-tenant solves each of these scenarios instantly. One odin platform can now support multiple instances and version of BroadWorks simultaneously. In addition, we are introducing the ability to audit, manage, move or migrate entire customers between platforms with ease.”

CTO Doris adds that, “When odin multi-tenant is combined with odin portal, odin provisioning and uses the API and webhooks feature to integrate into your billing system, or any system for that matter, across multiple BroadWorks instances… BOOM! That is the ‘Eureka’ moment! The old, expensive ways of managing and maintaining their ordering systems, their VoIP platform, and getting that information into a billing system are over.”

Simplicity Through and Through

Park Bench offers the choice to deploy odin locally, or hosted in the cloud to eliminate the infrastructure management aspects of their solution. The hosted option can be on dedicated or shared infrastructure, depending upon customer needs and preferences.

Licensing the odin platform is also as simple as it gets. The subscription cost is determined solely upon the number of BroadWorks subscribers in the environment and the duration, with additional discounts and price-lock on longer-term subscriptions. Simply request a demo from their website and you will be on your way to freeing up more time for your favorite activities, like spending more time sitting on a park bench.