Scenario

An important telecommunications company in South America deploys PBX phone systems on a pay-for-service basis. These PBX systems feature an RS-232 serial port, which is used by the company's headquarters to obtain the billing data needed to generate customer invoices.

Problem

How to collect the billing data from hundreds of remote PBX systems in order to generate customer invoices.

These PBX systems are widely spread throughout the continent, which makes data collection from them a challenging task. The company has a central billing server with access to the Internet and most of their customers have TCP/IP networks. The problem is connecting the PBX's RS-232 interface to the network in a way that allows their central billing server to interface with the PBXs natively.

The use of a regular serial-to-Ethernet gateway or device server could solve the RS-232 to TCP/IP conversion issue, but the usual devices available in the market do not offer enough flexibility to be customized to address the exact needs for this application.

Solution

Use the Cyclades-TS100 secure device server to interface with the remote PBXs and make their billing records available through the network to the central billing system located at the company's headquarters.



Cyclades-TS products run on embedded Linux and Cyclades makes its Cyclades Development Kit (CDK) available to all customers at no additional charge. The Cyclades CDK contains the complete source code and programming tools necessary to create custom embedded firmware images, which can then be easily installed onto any Cyclades-TS model. This is exactly what made the TS100 so attractive to the PBX company.

Using the CDK, the company created a custom firmware image for the TS100 that contained their own PBX billing collection application and an Open Source FTP server. One TS100 with custom firmware was installed and connected to each of their company's remote PBX systems so that it could collect all billing records from the PBX connected to it and store them locally. Their central billing system then automatically collects billing records stored on each TS100 by opening FTP connections to them and downloading all information stored in their local memory.

The TS100 solution is very cost effective because it is much less expensive than deploying a dedicated server for the task. The flexibility provided by its CDK allowed the PBX company to modify the TS100 firmware to fit perfectly into their environment and cover all their needs.