Table of contents. HP OpenCall. Interactive Media Products Family Mass Notification Whitepaper

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1 HP OpenCall Interactive Media Products Family Mass Notification Whitepaper Table of contents Abstract New business opportunities Problem solved HP and Opsol Integrators Inc The new business opportunity Preparing a cost-effective future The state of the alert partnering with HP

2 Carriers and network providers find a compelling business case for entering the mass notification market with newly voice-enabled applications. Now, they can serve the growing demand to have multiple mechanisms for alerting the public to emergency situations. Innovating Mass Alerts: Highly Evolved Platform Automates and Reduces the Cost of Mass Notification Abstract Today s emphasis on national security punctuates the importance of having an ability to quickly and effectively notify citizens and emergency response workers. Keeping up with this change, enhancements in today s communication systems have made it possible to go beyond traditional radio and TV announcements. Now messages can be sent to millions of users via standard phone lines and received by users as voice, SMS or even text messages and s. Messages can even be customized to a specific location or set of users. As a result of these enhancements local, state, and federal agencies spent $14 billion in 2002 for commercial telecommunications services, according to Chantilly, a Virginia-based research firm. Now, the President s Homeland Security Plan and 2003 budget proposed $3.5B specifically to support firstresponders, groups that have a priority responsibility for alerting the public to emergency situations. While this field has been dominated by a variety of smaller players to date, carriers are really the only ones uniquely qualified to address this growing need. Service providers already have the necessary infrastructure, which makes them well positioned for this role. By leveraging their existing national infrastructure and the latest enhancements of media and messaging technology, service providers can own the next wave in mass notification. HP can assist carriers willing to grow into this expansive market. Already over 60% of the worlds SMS messages are managed by HP s OpenCall technology. HP s media technology has also been deployed for over 350,000 voice ports globally. With this experience and HP s OpenCall Media Platform technology, HP is well positioned to partner with carriers for the next wave of business growth. New business opportunities It s a sign of the times that government and public safety agencies are realizing their expertise for implementing the advanced capabilities above has practical limits and is best "out-sourced" to network owners and service providers. In this way, mass notification messages can be transmitted via land line or cell phones, pagers, over the Internet to online users, and future satellite services. Customers are finding the in-house deployments they made previously cannot scale to the job today. It takes hours to alert even a thousand users. These early deployments were made with proprietary technology that makes further expansion or enhancement of services difficult, while increasing the cost of ownership. Next-generation communications capabilities are very practically implemented using a combination of technologies available today to wireless and wire line service providers. As such, federal, state, and local agencies can use a combination of siren warning systems, E-911 calling, TV/Cable warning systems, radio messaging, internet message transmission, and GIS-based automated notification to support a combination of mass notification warnings that s both effective and efficient. A few examples make this clear. 2

3 Law enforcement agencies can measurably improve the safety of residents when dealing with hazardous materials emergencies. If their local service provider is using the HP OpenCall Media Platform the industry's only carrier-grade, software-based media platform for integrating voice services then they can quickly develop a custom message about the particular hazard as well as instructions for leaving the area as quickly possible. This message can be targeted specifically to those affected by the situation. This capability means the right information gets to the right people in time. Similarly customized messages can alert selected residents to weather warnings, snow plowing operations, lost/missing children, senior citizen health checks, or crime watch situations. A 511 plan for a state highway department can provide drivers having hands-free wireless service with advance notices. Now, that driver can have timely notice about construction detours, traffic delays, special events, weather and road surface conditions, or news about public transportation providers. Notably, the same mass notification infrastructure can be leveraged to non-emergency services. For example, enterprises need to reach employees while they are in the field and advise them of important events or new sales programs. A mass notification system with voice integration is ideal for getting attention of employees and keeping them upto-date about changing price structures and discounts, incentives, or important product and service information. Enterprises can also notify customers of special sales events or product training seminars. Now, all employees Given the limitations of pre-existing, proprietary solutions for mass alerting that agencies have been implementing for themselves, it should be clear that carriers and network providers are inherently better equipped to reliably provision customized, voice integrated notification services that can alert hundreds of thousands or millions of customers within a few minutes. Most importantly, it doesn t require a huge investment in proprietary systems or training outside a carrier s core competency. don t have to be on the same internal communications system to get the latest updates. Problem solved HP and Opsol Integrators Inc., provide an integrated solution for mass notification in the carrier network. It is clear there is significant revenue potential to implementing a highly customizable mass notification system. Now carriers are stuck with the question of how to successfully implement a voice-enabled solution within their network, while allowing complementary integration with SMS and other systems. End customers and government agencies who have deployed internal solutions today, rather than purchase services from carriers, are already experiencing pain with these systems. Many also realize proprietary solutions strain their IT resources and that carriers are, in fact, better equipped to accomplish this with technology that easily integrates with their current infrastructure, i.e., the HP OpenCall Media Platform. Consider the case of one U.S. carrier that was configuring a system for sending 15, second messages. The goal was to send all messages within 10 minutes. A competitive solution based on Dialogic boards would require deploying over 180 servers, which clearly makes the project technically unfeasible and unmanageable. Using HP OpenCall Media Platform, the solution quickly becomes far more practical, requiring only 15 of HP s rp5470 servers running the HP OpenCall Media Platform. The new business opportunity builds from carrier-strength technology When looking at new business potential of using HP OpenCall Media Platform to automate and reduce the cost of mass, custom notification, it s important to recognize certain functional elements. This mass notification system is based on HP OpenCall Media Platform carrier grade media server, supporting up to 2016 channels on a single media card. With integrated software-based digital signal processing (SoftDSP), this is the only highly scalable platform that can offer the necessary density to notify millions of people via voice in minutes without requiring an entire data center. HP OpenCall Media Platform is built for openness. Aside from running on standard PA-RISC computing platforms, it uses standard-based interfaces (Java and VoiceXML) to integrate messaging and other applications on top of the platform. HP OpenCall Media Platform also uses standard interfaces for speech resources (MRCP) to ensure easy integration with existing speech processing products. The Opsol notification application resides behind the HP OpenCall Media Platform to ensure easy administration and scalability. The messages are stored in an industry-standard 3

4 IVR for Mass Notification HP OpenCall Media Platform provides the necessary SS7 and media connectivity to the carrier network. It can also provide a standard interface for voice applications (VXML and Java) as well as Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP) for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text to Speech (TTS). The Opsol OmniMessaging application allows for central management and customization of messages to be sent via voice, SMS, text and . Fax Signaling ISUP T1/E1/V.35 OpenCall Media Platform Data POP SMTP IMAP Phone Switch Voice T1/E1/DS3/OC-3/STM1 Java interface Internet/IP Messaging Application and Message Store SMS MMS Mobile Phone Pager mail system, which has been enhanced to scale to highvolume messaging. This system is integrated with provisioning, accounting and management packages, which makes for a single point of administration. Security has also been improved and made integral to the solution and available to custom applications. In conjunction with messaging technology from Opsol, HP OpenCall Media Platform can push concise messages to tens of thousands of users per minute. It is even capable of two-way communication, meaning that customers can respond using voice or DTMF commands. Messages can contain a wide range of contextual data for wireless phones, SMS, pagers, and PDAs, all with the push of one button. Case Study A top-five European carrier, in partnership with the local metropolitan government is currently deploying a mass notification program for a city of 15 million citizens. The platform will enable city authorities to send alerts almost immediately to specific citizens in limited geographic locations via mail, SMS, text, voice, TV and radio. The solution is being designed to send 15 million calls within ten minutes. Interestingly, these requirements were recently scaled up from three million. Preparing a cost-effective future HP OpenCall Media Platform can reduce total cost of ownership by up to 35% over traditional, less-scalablesolutions. Actual numbers from a recent analyst study makes this even clearer. Annual operating costs for the HP OpenCall Media Platform, supporting hundreds of ports, is dramatically lower than competitive mid-range platforms with support limited to just 96 ports. The study included consideration of investment in both hardware and middleware, allocations for spares and maintenance, central office costs, and data communication costs within the operations group. A key benefit to the HP OpenCall mass notification system is its potential to enhance the long-term cost savings. Carriers can reduce the complexity of their networks while quickly adding desirable services on an as needed basis. Carriers can receive considerable savings by leveraging the same infrastructure to deploy multiple applications, aside from just mass notification. However, these savings have not been considered as part of this analysis. This savings is largely the result of HP s strategy to leverage open systems standards: Industry standard hardware vs. proprietary hardware. Software-based Digital Signal Processing (SoftDSP) vs. hardware cards. Standard interfaces vs. proprietary. Support for thousands of ports on one box vs. only hundreds. 4

5 An additional benefit of HP OpenCall Media Platform is the investment protection it provides. The same HP OpenCall Media Platform system can migrate from a circuit-based network to an IP network without any hardware changes or forklift upgrades. The state of the alert partnering with HP Carriers can partner with HP to ensure they can grow revenue through custom notification solutions: The HP OpenCall Media Platform and support for mass notification is based on familiar HP OpenView and OpenCall technology that s already being used in many carrier and service provider networks. Also, HP has preintegrated and tested the HP OpenCall Media Platform with the Opsol messaging application to ensure ease of deployment. HP has carrier-grade technology to scale to the necessary levels, and support multiple applications as well as an IP infrastructure. An important benefit of the HP hardware and software solutions is scalability. The mass notification system can scale to thousands of channels per system, allowing just a few systems to manage entire metropolitan areas. Partnering for success Partnering with HP ensures not only a stable technology contributor, but also a sales partner for accessing multiple business models from corporate enterprises to government and homeland security agencies. HP has dedicated field teams to work with carriers and drive the sales process directly to both enterprise and government organizations. HP also has an office dedicated to Homeland Security specifically designed to address opportunities with the U.S. Federal Office of Homeland Security. HP s marketing and sales organization allows carriers to penetrate new markets with novel services. Carriers can leverage the expertise of HP s enterprise and government sales force for extensive market penetration. These teams are well trained and understand the development, configuration, testing & verification, deployment, and support & service issues involved. By working with HP, carriers can expand their markets for services and increase revenues. HP s expertise and strong relationships with enterprises and government make it a powerful partner. Table 1. Mapping product features of the HP OpenCall Media Platform shows distinct advantages of the software-based approach for implementing mass notification. Feature: Open systems and soft DSP Notify millions of users in minutes VoiceXML and MRCP interface Benefit: Save approximately 35% on TCO Increase revenue by leveraging existing voice infrastructure Flexible solution can be leveraged to other voice solutions Support over 2000 ports/server Reduced management requirements by 2/3 Customized messages in text and voice Ensure the right information gets to the right people 5

6 All Rights Reserved. Reproduction, adaptation, or translation without prior written permission is prohibited, except as allowed under the copyright laws. All brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Java and all Java-based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All information is subject to change without any prior notice. (E.&O.E) Photo is for illustrative purposes only, actual product may differ from time to time. For warranties, please check with your local country reseller or local Hewlett-Packard offices. To learn more about HP s offering, visit Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. 09/2003