Casting Powerful Spells

One Net's path to "The Prestige" - From Proof of Concept to Product.

Looking back at all the achievements that have been reached and at the bright future that awaits, one cannot consider the One Net’s path to be anything less of magical. And, as in all the great magic tricks, one can look at its path and split it in three parts or act

Part I – Starting with something ordinary.

“The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course...it probably isn't.”

As with many great solutions, One Net started off as a small but ambitious development project back in 2008. Leveraging on the knowledge acquired from launching their first fixed voice service to the consumer market, Vodafone Portugal decided to invest in developing an innovative voice solution for the corporate market. The goal was simple: provide a cloud-based service that removes from customers the need to buy and maintain costly on-premises PABXs, thus allowing them to access all of the common business-level voice features, such as call queuing, auto-attendant, etc., at a fraction of the price and of the hassle.

The project was such a success that it generated enthusiasm (and investment) from Vodafone UK as well, ensuring that it would become a ready-to-launch solution. This culminated with Vodafone successfully launching the One Net offering on 9th September 2009 (i.e., the magical 9.9.9!).

At this time, Celfocus was already actively contributing to this success with a small team of consultants directly working in developing the solution that ended up being launched.

Part II – Turning it into something extraordinary.

“The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary.”

In 2011 the One Net solution development and maintenance responsibility transitioned from Vodafone to Celfocus, so that it could be taken further and internationalised, spreading it across other Vodafone markets.

Since then, Celfocus has been constantly evolving the One Net solution, delivering over 25 major and minor releases and increasing the value of the solution with items such as (but not only):

• Entirely new back office and self-care portals, replacing the old ones and providing CSP operators and customers a significantly more enjoyable operation and self-care experience, respectively.
• Key integrations with Microsoft® Skype and Google® Voice, allowing those endpoints to be used as regular One Net devices and providing users the ability to benefit from the best of both worlds: the collaboration features of those endpoints and the enhanced voice communication abilities of One Net.
• The Air Time Limitation feature and support for Holdings (i.e., corporate groups, such as Novabase), which allowed us to replace legacy systems and enter new markets.
• Computer Telephony Interaction (CTI) and Click-to-Call APIs, allowing external applications (e.g., CRM applications or customer websites) to make, receive and monitor calls

On top of that, Celfocus has been investing in its own feature roadmap, introducing features that differentiate the solution from others, namely the Call Centre Starter Edition add-on.

This add-on allows current One Net customers to access the most common inbound Call Centre features, such as real-time wallboards/dashboards and more advanced call distribution logic and reporting, without the need to integrate with a separate call centre solution.

By avoiding complex integrations, the Communications Service Provider’s (CSPs) Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the One Net Call Centre offering is greatly reduced, while still ensuring the overall user experience is not impacted.

Figure 2 – Current CELFOCUS One Net deployments.

These enhancements allowed us to deploy the solution in 2 more strategic markets, Albania and Turkey, positioning us as reference Unified Communications (UC) provider and allowing us to realistically target other key markets as well.

“Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet.”

Part III – Making something extraordinary isn't enough; you have to make it brilliant.

“That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige".”

In the ever evolving telecommunications and IT markets, where trends come and go quicker than a magician shuffles cards, the path is not yet clearly defined but it clearly points towards the direction of mixing things up with IoT, BYOD, collaboration/productivity platforms, virtualization and mobility/location-awareness, leveraging on technologies such as WebRTC, VoLTE and 5G, as well as the more generic web and mobile technology trends.

Completing this “magic trick” and taking One Net to the next level means turning it into a full-fledged Celfocus product that can clearly set CSPs and their customers apart. It means providing an even better experience in all its facets and innovate where others are just filling in the gaps. It also means fitting it within the existing Celfocus product portfolio, allowing a cohesive, complete, vertical telecommunications offer to be provided by Celfocus to CSPs.

If your voice could be anything, what would it be?