Park Bench Solutions
VoIP Infrastructure Management, Simplified!

For organizations providing VoIP services to businesses, one of the most pressing challenges is the difficulty in managing the fragmented and siloed systems of their own and their client’s infrastructures. Through their powerful REST API, named odin, Park Bench Solutions is a company that tackles this issue head-on, for one of the world’s most sought-after VoIP application platforms: BroadWorks. In an interview with the Founder and CEO of Park Bench Solutions, Marc Tribbe, and the CTO, Dusty Doris, we discussed the company’s journey, their platform, odin, and their vision for the future.

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: BroadSoft (now part of Cisco Systems). Their odin platform is a powerful ally to BroadSoft’s flagship application platform, BroadWorks, which serves VoIP subscribers all over the world. Park Bench has been in development for nine years now and formally launched the company in 2011. They recognized this fundamental need for a nimble, quick-to-market solution to get valuable data in and out of the robust and complex BroadWorks environment. This has historically been an unwieldy challenge given the breadth of features and options that are available within the BroadWorks platform and its evolution over time. In short, with the odin platform, all the heavy lifting is already done. The endless cycle of redevelopment, retesting and recertification between all custom or third-party apps and BroadWorks is all but eliminated with odin. In addition, the odin platform includes several pre-built modules to deliver further time and cost savings.

Enhancing the BroadWorks Platform

BroadSoft regularly offers newer versions of its software to its clients. And having to stay in sync and updated proved troublesome for service providers and developers who have their own applications and business processes to worry about. The odin platform seamlessly handles BroadWork’s version control. This ensures that clients will never have to concern themselves about BroadSoft’s updates moving forward. Therefore redevelopment becomes a thing of the past. To help service providers, third-party integrators and developers build their own products that could interact with the BroadWorks platform; they built a powerful API and WebHook layer. This layer of abstraction gives them an opportunity to provide rules or conditions related to specific requirements without directly affecting the core BroadWorks platform. Any modification done to the platform is immediately notified to a client’s end-point via a WebHook from odin. As an example, building a new customer in BroadWorks via their internal API (OCI-P) can take thousands of independent API calls to code, test and manage. All of this can be replaced with one singular API call through odin.

odin: The Power of the Platform

The odin API and WebHook layer is the game-changing technology that empowers service providers, and also anyone in the development community, to build simple automation workflows upon their own platform. Their solution encapsulates the necessary elements that a service provider requires from their VoIP phone system, and all in one place.

Furthermore, the odin platform comes with several other pre-built, already-integrated, modules that can be deployed out of the box or phased into an existing ecosystem over time. Each of these modules adds valuable features that save additional time and money. The power of the odin platform includes the following modules available at no additional cost:
• portal
• provisioning
• clone
• bulk
• wholesale
• reporting

Excellence in Action: A Customer Example

Founder and CEO, Marc Tribbe shared that one of their top customers in the UK had a legacy platform owned by BroadSoft, that they wanted to replace with a flexible system that would adapt to their dynamic environment. The company wanted to streamline most of their processes that included ordering, billing, and notification services; they wanted to automate their ordering and billing process and connect it directly to the BroadWorks platform. “As opposed to the traditional manual methods of updating or deleting customer information on the keyboards, this could now all be done in a matter of minutes with the help of our odin API. Services such as notification alerts for customers and internal staff were also enabled, to simplify the system even further. All of this was achieved within just three week’s time.”

Differentiating Factors

No two service providers are the same. Park Bench doesn’t just sell an out-of-the-box solution and leave. They listen to their customers, and help them create their own customized solutions and implementations. The Park Bench Professional Services division helps clients with the integration of their platform, but also any homegrown apps, or third-party software as well. They have an Agile development team with a bench of talent available for projects of all sizes. “When a client approaches us with their ideal scenarios, our team builds the end-to-end solution roadmap lined with all the intrinsic details needed to succeed,” says Tribbe.

Roadmap

According to their CTO, Dusty Doris, “Our focus for the future is currently on expanding our API capabilities and adding Software Development Kits (SDKs) to our core offering. We have an exciting ecosystem of partners that leverage the odin API and Webhooks to build, sell and support their own products more efficiently.” Tribbe adds that “with the latest odin platform, organizations can now easily create new revenue-generating and cost-saving solutions tailored to fit their business requirements.” This year, the BroadSoft Connections conference being held in Miami (FL) the week of November 11, will showcase several companies who have developed their own products and solutions by leveraging the powerful odin platform.

Both Doris and Tribbe will be in attendance and welcome the opportunity to meet with anyone interested in learning more.