Build or buy

Metropolitan Health Group (MHG) provides medical scheme administration and managed healthcare services to the corporate and retail market. It administers approximately 20 schemes, serving over one million individual members. Some of the schemes are managed on a wholly outsourced basis. For others, MHG provides systems and business process licensing on a franchise basis. Call centre operations, naturally, form an integral part of its service offering.

MHG's main call centre runs on an Atio application called CyberCall, which runs on Windows. Atio SA modified the product earlier this year, apparently "in response to market demand" to enable the system to run on the open source Asterisk solution.

Says Atio customer services head Almarie Reed: "We've had a relationship with MHG for about five years, supplying [the company] with the locally developed CyberCall solution. MHG has used the Microsoft version for about four or five years, which runs on an older version of Windows. MHG had repeatedly asked us what we were doing in the open source software (OSS) space, as it wanted to migrate, and we had had a few queries from the market, so we decided to migrate the solution to Linux and create an interface to Asterisk. We went back to MHG and confirmed that we could do it.

"MHG wanted a cost-effective, scalable solution that had more functionality than the existing system. Because OSS is becoming a reality, MHG didn't see the need to pay R20 000 to R30 000 in licence fees for a product."

Asterisk is an open source PBX software solution. It offers voice over IP (VOIP) in many protocols and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment, according to the Asterisk site. It provides voicemail services with directory, call conferencing, interactive voice response (IVR) and call queuing. It has support for three-way calling, caller ID services, analogue display services interface (ADSI), session initiation protocol (SIP) and H.323 (as both client and gateway).

SIP enables multi-party telephone or multimedia calls, and H.323, according to Wikipedia "defines the protocols to provide audio-visual communication sessions on any packet network".

"Asterisk comes with full voice recording capability, which is the expensive part of any telephony solution for a call centre," says Reed. "MHG uses Asterisk voice recording and CyberCall is basically a tool that sits on top of that, providing advanced call routing functionality."

Atio implemented CyberCall on Asterisk over two days in June 2006. Says MHG IT infrastructure manager Rod Russell: "CyberCall works quite well, but from a usage and licence point of view, we decided to develop our own in-house product. It will save us quite a lot of money."

We decided to develop our own in-house product [which] will save us quite a lot of money.

Rod Russell, IT infrastructure manager, MHG

At the time that Atio was porting CyberCall to Linux, MHG needed to get the Government Employees Medical Scheme call centre up and running in a short space of time (about two-and-a-half weeks). CyberCall wasn't ready, so it developed an application that mimics some of CyberCall's functionality and started running it on Asterisk.

"Since then it has really blossomed and is now a full-blown call centre application," says Russell. MHG is going to call the application Vital - an abbreviation of Vitalstatistix, which plays on the constant mispronunciation of Asterisk as Asterix, and also accurately describes what the application provides.

At the moment, Russell's team is making adjustments to scale from one to 1 000 call centre extensions using Asterisk and Vital. "CyberCall runs our main call centre [on Windows], but over the next year, we're going to port the remaining CyberCall call centres over to Asterisk. By the end of 2007, we plan to be completely converted."

MHG will then be using its own application for all of its call centres, as well as running the entire company's PBXs on Asterisk. "Over 1 600 people will be running on Asterisk," says Russell. "We also use it to do voice recording, which will save us R4.5 million over the next two years, and that is a significant amount to save. Our inbound faxing also goes through Asterisk, so we now only use RightFax for outbound faxing."

MHG's experience is proof of what open source pundits have been saying for some time now: that there are definitely cost savings to be had in moving to OSS. It also proves SA has the skills and ability to develop applications to suit local business's needs, from SMEs to enterprise.