PROTON BANK is a small but rapidly growing commercial bank headquartered in Athens, Greece. Having recently gone though a phase of back-to-back mergers and acquisitions, as part of their strategic development plan, PROTON is set to become one of the first banks to focus on the important yet previously underserved segment of small and medium business in Greece. PROTON’s IT Department was thus presented with the task of integrating, upgrading and expanding the core network and telephony services to cope with the growing demands of this challenging expansion scheme. To aid in this task PROTON contracted Cisco’s Silver Partner and renowned Unified Communications expert Algosystems, one of LOGITEL’s long time channel partners.

Soon after the engaging in the expansion and upgrade of its Cisco-based core networking and IP telephony infrastructure with Algosystems, PROTON was faced with the challenge of scaling its existing call recording solution according to the new requirements. Their legacy solution, while adequately fulfilling the bank’s needs at the time before the acquisitions, started to present difficulties with issues such as increasing the existing capacity to include a large number of new users, high-availability, and multisite recording capabilities.

Apostolos Karavaggelis, PROTON’s Networking and Telecom department head, stated: “The bank records telephone calls for compliance and quality monitoring purposes. Our old, appliance-based recording system worked well for us in the past. We had two appliances installed at each of our two main sites at the time. However, after a series of mergers and acquisitions we were now faced with multiple sites where recording was necessary and a large number of new users. And, of course, high-availability and redundancy of the system were now critical factors. When we consulted with our previous vendor regarding the upgrade and expansion of our system we unfortunately came across a deadlock. First of all the hardware based solution had a finite number of concurrent users that each appliance could handle. Also, multisite recording capabilities with centralized management and storage were not an option of the particular product and in order to implement it we would have to move to different platform all together. Lastly, high availability came at an outrageous cost, thus we decided to look around at other solutions available.”

To address these issues faced by their new customer Alsosystems turned to LOGITEL for a call recording solution that would integrate well in a Cisco environment and would help PROTON overcome the shortcomings of their existing system. LOGITEL’s sales engineers worked closely with Algosystems to propose a solution based on CallRex VoIP call recording software from TELREX. CallRex is a pure software platform for IP-based call recording. It utilizes port mirroring functionality, found in most enterprise-grade data switches today, to capture voice packets as they traverse the corporate network.

TELREX has a long history of integrating with Cisco products, and the company was selected by Cisco for Solution Developer level membership in the Cisco Developer Network (formerly the Cisco Technology Developer Program). Further, TELREX's product suite has been accepted into Cisco's Industry Solutions Partner Network (ISPN) for demonstrating a track record of success within multiple industries and customer sites.

CallRex presented PROTON with a number of key benefits versus their current appliance-based product:

• A pure software based solution that runs on standard commodity servers. Scalability for higher capacity is simply a matter of adding more hardware resources and storage – both very cost-effective.
• The software is certified to run on virtual machines making hardware utilization and scalability all the more efficient.
• The product has a very simple and straightforward licensing scheme. Each user/phone device on the system requires a license. Adding more capacity to the system does not require multiple components or complex calculations to figure out the cost.
• In case of hardware failure the system is restored by simply moving license keys to a new host. No need for a cold-spare unit “collecting dust” or waiting for a replacement unit.
• Call recording becomes a standard IT application. IT staff can use existing tools for management, monitoring and backups. They also utilize existing resources and infrastructure such as shared network storage.
• The application allows for multisite recording in a very simple and cost effective manner. A software module called the Data Collector Service is deployed at remote sites and can forward recordings acquired locally via the WAN ether in real-time or scheduled time intervals in order to conserve bandwidth during peak usage hours of the network.
• High availability is inherent in a virtual environment. Otherwise, a duplicate installation comes in as very cost-efficient alternative with minimal administrative overhead and resource consumption impact.

Algosystems decided to employ LOGITEL’s Professional Services to implement the system which was deployed easily in a matter of a couple of days. CallRex call recording has been in operation since March 2010 and has already proved its robustness and simplicity when PROTON, in yet another move driven by its rapid growth plan, had to split their headquarter operations over three new sites across the city of Athens. The system was reconfigured to span through the new sites in just a few hours without significant changes in the original network setup leaving PROTON’s IT staff immensely satisfied with their choice or vendor and partners. Algosystems has now made TELREX their preferred vendor of choice for call recording solutions to cover the needs of both their new and existing customers with Cisco IP Telephony systems deployed.