Blagosostoyani
Digium's official reseller in Russia, managed the deployment of the distributed IP-PBX Asterisk solution for the Blagosostoyanie Fund
"Blagosostoyanie" is the largest non-governmental retirement fund of the Russian Federation with 1.5 million customers and reserves of over 1 billion US dollars in the year 2005 . It provides corporate retirement plans for employees of Russian Railroad Systems, the government-owned railroad network. The retirement fund Blagosostoyanie has 18 major regional and 39 local offices spread across the vast territory of Russia.
In the first quarter of 2006, ITConnection, Digium's official reseller in Russia, managed the deployment of the distributed IP-PBX Asterisk solution for the Blagosostoyanie fund which linked all 18 major regional offices of the fund spread across 11 time zones (or more than 5,000 miles from the city of Kaliningrad in Eastern Europe to the neighboring with Japan Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in Asia). The main requirements set by the retirement fund's IT specialists towards the Asterisk solution were the ease of each node's administration, large number of participants in conferences (up to 30 parties bridged in one conference), possible system expansion and feature enhancement in the future and its integration with traditional telephony networks at its Moscow facility through PRI interfaces.
DUNDi (Distributed Universal Number Discovery), sponsored by Digium, was used as a tool to create an enterprise peer-to-peer (P2P) system of fully-federated PBX systems with no central point of failure and the ability to arbitrarily add new extensions, gateways and other resources to a trusted web of communication servers. With DUNDi, any adds, moves, changes, failures or new routes are automatically absorbed within the cloud with no additional configuration. Interconnected with DUNDi peers, all nodes were given power to share and request information about extensions and trunks registered across the network. Any change in the dial plan or addition of new extensions at any location became available to the rest of the offices.
To facilitate administration of the nodes at the regional locations ITConnection installed Asterisk with call detail records (CDR) statistics, call queuing, interactive voice response (IVR), conference bridging and many other features. Simple and reliable integration of the retirement fund's VoIP system into the traditional telephony network was completed at the central Moscow office through the Digium ISDN PRI E1 interface wildcards.
The retirement fund's VoIP network included the Asterisk server dedicated to conferences between offices with web based interface and MeetMe Conference Control, a convenient company management tool in bridging and coordinating conferencing parties.
By the end of 2006, Fund's distributed office is planned to serve 500
subscribers, including those of interconnected PBXs, and this number will be growing in 2007.
As the result of Asterisk implementation performed by ITConnection, Blagosostoyanie saves 150-200% on long distance calls between the geographically separated offices. The company's central and regional managers can easily and timely meet in conference calls. The enterprise network is easily scalable and adjustable to any future growth and is not limited or tied to the number of ports as in legacy PBX systems. At the end of the project an article "DUNDi Enterprise Configuration SIP with no Passwords" and its Russian-language version were published to benefit the Open Source community.
ITConnection thanks Igor Ofitserov, the IT department's vice president of the retirement fund Blagosostoyanie for his help and support during the project implementation.
