TELECOM SECTOR

Integration of Microsoft Teams with a Mobile Business Communications System

Case study at a glance

The Challenge

Helping with a major mobile company’s development
Integrate the company’s mobile communications platform and Microsoft Teams
Provide secure cloud environments to support the project

The Solution

Use of Mediant Cloud Edition by AudioCodes to connect Teams
Automated Infrastructure provision via AWS CloudFormation templates
Leading the design side of the solution- including EC2 instances, VPCs and AWS CloudFront distributions

The Benefit

Flexibility and cost savings
Repeatability of infrastructure design
Seamless integration

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The Challenge

Our customer, a major mobile telecom company, provides a platform for business users to integrate mobile communications with their fixed corporate communications, such as landlines, email and instant messaging.

The telecoms company wished to offer integration of its platform with Microsoft Teams to its customers. Customers who used the system for mobile conferencing, messaging etc. would be able to use it seamlessly with Microsoft Teams, for example to be able to attend Teams meetings easily from their corporate mobile device while retaining all the functionality of the corporate mobile platform.

The challenge was to support the development effort with secure cloud environments which could be set up and torn down rapidly enough to keep pace with the development project.

The Solution

Automation Consultants provided environments and infrastructure to support the development and live operation of an integration between the company’s integrated mobile communications platform and Microsoft Teams. The integration made use of Mediant Cloud Edition by AudioCodes to connect Teams to the company’s Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunk. As a major telecoms provider, the company had to ensure that the integration was multi-tenanted, i.e. its different customers could integrate their instance of Teams with their instance of the corporate telecoms solution without any effect on or being affected by other customers.

The environments AC provided had to evolve quickly to keep up with a rapid development effort, and the whole project was delivered in four months, going live in July 2021. The process involved:

Leading the design of the infrastructure side of the solution: The design included EC2 instances (i.e. virtual servers), load balancers, virtual private clouds (VPCs), subnets and AWS CloudFront distributions. An important part of the design consisted of autoscaling groups for sets of Windows and Linux servers. Scalability is essential to the solution, because the load on the system depends on the number of customers, and that cannot be predicted with certainty.

Creating AWS CloudFormation templates to define each aspect of the required infrastructure: This infrastructure as code (IaS) ensured repeatability, enabled tracking of design changes and allowed the provision of infrastructure to keep up with a fast-paced development effort.The elements in AWS and the CloudFormation templates had to conform to the customer’s internal standards. It has a large number of assets in AWS and a common set of standards helps it to manage and operate them. Use of CloudFormation templates made it easier to manage change in the environment specifications, since the CloudFormation templates could be stored in the company’s AWS CodeCommit code repository, and it gave better version control and more rigour. Each time the environment was created, the CloudFormation templates guaranteed that it was exactly the same as the previous time, except for any deliberate changes which might have been made to the design.

The Benefits

Automation Consultants’ solution provided flexible infrastructure that kept up with a fast-paced development effort, and yet is secure and can be set up in an automated way, repeatably, any number of times, thanks to CloudFormation IaS templates.

Flexibility and cost savings

The storing of CloudFormation templates in AWS CodeCommit enabled the development team to revert to older versions of the infrastructure whenever required.The CloudFormation templates also contributed to substantial cost reductions. The environments could be taken down every evening, and recreated in minutes the next day. They also saved developer time; creating the infrastructure manually in the console would have taken about three weeks, and been prone to human error.

Repeatability of infrastructure design

Now that the integration of the corporate customer mobile platform and Teams has gone live, AC’s CloudFormation templates provide a fixed infrastructure design that can be set up afresh at any time and is known to work for the application.

Seamless integration

In this world of remote working brought on by the Covid pandemic, the mobile company’s customers can now integrate their corporate mobile platform seamlessly with Teams.