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, 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.
Adapting to remote model
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. 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
"Console Connect made our life very easy. We were in the middle of planning a large-scale WAN upgrade to our global MPLS network and Console Connect was the perfect fit," says Kathyrn Marshall, chief commercial officer, Acquire BPO.
Scaling into new markets
Console Connect transformed Acquire BPO’s enterprise network architecture, giving the company instant access to multiple clouds and a range 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 PCCW Global’s 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.
Network control and flexibility
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 PCCW Global technical team when it came to accommodating some of the unique requirements of the project.
Console Connect enabled Acquire BPO to create high-performance 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.
"Console Connect helped close gaps in our design while being able to provide additional redundancy at a fraction of their competitors’ cost," says Kathryn Marshall, chief commercial officer, Acquire BPO.
