Case Study: Acquire BPO
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Overview of Acquire BPO
Australia-based Acquire BPO is a full-scale outsourced contact centre and business process outsourcing company, employing 10,000 people across Australia, the Philippines, the US and the Dominican Republic.
Acquire BPO serves a wide range of industries, including telecoms, banking & financial services, insurance, media, education and retail, with outsourced call centre services offering customer service, sales, technical support, retention campaigns, back-office functions, software development and marketing.
The company’s business is built on its ability to deliver high availability and high quality connections for its customers. This means the underlying network is mission critical.
Acquire BPO relies on carrier-grade dedicated International Private Lines (IPLs) providing ‘local call’ clarity from anywhere around the globe. The company has a triangular setup network design with diverse paths for geographical redundancy and multiple Tier 1 carriers - including PCCW Global - to mitigate risks of carrier-level outages.
Challenge
Acquire BPO is currently experiencing exponential growth year-on-year and is adding more physical delivery locations and call centres. In the wake of the global pandemic, it is also offering a comprehensive Work from Home (WFH) environment to its employees.
This means connectivity has to be optimised not just for its call centre infrastructure, but also to ensure high quality availability for home workers as well.
The company’s legacy network consisted of Points of Presence (PoPs) in 7 cities: Melbourne/Sydney (HQ), Tokyo, Manila (major call centre), Hong Kong, Singapore, San Jose and Los Angeles.
Kathryn Marshall
Chief Commercial Officer
These PoPs were mainly supported by 1Gbps Dedicated Ethernet Service (DES) circuits, which could no longer support the capacity required for growth. In addition to optimising capacity, the company had several other objectives in mind. Acquire BPO was looking to:
- Reduce provisioning time for new links
- Migrate to an on-demand usage model
- Easily set up new connections and increase capacity as it grew
- Introduce centralised and real-time network monitoring
- Reduce resource overheads and ensure network problems were resolved quickly
Solution
Console Connect transformed Acquire BPO’s enterprise network architecture, giving the company instant access to multiple clouds and a range of on-demand services.
As is the way with legacy network assets, the key challenge is how to connect to a diversity of data centre infrastructures efficiently, while ensuring a business can meet future requirements.
The benefit of a Software Defined Interconnection® (SDI) fabric, such as Console Connect, is that it enables enterprises to interconnect their data centres on-demand, rather than being locked into any single ecosystem. Ultimately, this gives Acquire BPO the ability to scale quickly in new markets or instantly turn up services across a truly global footprint.
It also enabled Acquire BPO to access an MPLS network and only pay for the bandwidth it uses. Using Console Connect, Acquire BPO was able to self-provision six 10G ports to its PoPs in Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Los Angeles. In addition, Console Connect also set up a 1G DES on AJC (Australia Japan Cable Network) from Sydney to Tokyo.
Results
Migrating to Console Connect meant Acquire BPO gained much more control over its global network infrastructure, with the ability to selfmanage on-demand Layer 2 connections across all its Console Connect ports. This meant the company could respond to dynamic situations and grow the network as and when it needed.
The reason Console Connect is able to get things done a lot faster than provisioning a traditional MPLS link is that its software defined and virtualised nature takes care of all of the activity ‘behind the curtain’ on your behalf.
The network sits on its own MPLS network, while Console Connect applies a layer of abstraction to set up and tear down dedicated connections on that network using SDI. Console Connect takes many of the problems away from data centre to data centre interconnection and allows users to scale up bandwidth between data centres and their enterprise sites in near real-time.
The platform also delivers significant cost savings to Acquire BPO. The nature of SDI means it is not as costly or complex to interconnect data centres and manage network connectivity. Furthermore, customers are no longer restricted to a single data centre environment but are instead tapping into a flexible, fluid and intelligent networking model to create a global interconnect fabric that grows with their future needs
Outcomes
Acquire BPO benefitted from having much more granular control over their network infrastructure through Console Connect, which was described as a “simple, elegant and functional portal.”
The company also received support from the Console Connect technical team when it came to accommodating some of the unique requirements of the project.
Console Connect enabled Acquire BPO to create highperformance connectivity to its network assets in a more flexible way that could help its business react quicker to the growing demand for call centre services. On-demand connectivity meant no more long lead times and restrictive contracts for Acquire BPO, and instead allowed the company to focus on its core business.
Kathryn Marshall
Chief Commercial Officer