Norwood Systems Ltd (ASX: NOR) reports that Spark NZ has successfully launched its on-premises visual voicemail solution.
Norwood’s advanced visual voicemail offering provides a modern voicemail interface for users to visually browse and manage voicemail messages through an App.
Voicemail messages are transcribed with advanced speech recognition technology, enabling users simply to read their voicemail messages, similarly to text messages, and also enables several other benefits such as text-based search and urgent voicemail alerts.
Traditionally, accessing voicemail messages meant dialling digit codes to navigate a telephone user interface. This process is time-consuming and tedious for a seemingly simple task.
For Spark, Norwood developed a multi-site, geo-redundant on-premises visual voicemail solution in conjunction with other subcontractors, which is now integrated into Spark’s virtualised network and compute infrastructure.
Norwood is now able to offer this geo-redundant ‘on-premises’ solution to other service providers, allowing failover to occur within and to alternative sites should service become unavailable at a site. Norwood’s solution also scales horizontally so additional sites or data centres can be added dynamically for a growing customer base with no limitations. The same solution can scale up to 100 million users or more.
Norwood’s solution supports the multiple audio codecs in use on the Spark network including AMR-WB, AMR- NB and PCMA. The solution is also integrated into Spark’s perimeter security infrastructure and meets Spark’s rigorous security evaluations.
Norwood’s machine learning-based urgency detection algorithm is also hosted on-premises and instantly classifies voicemails as urgent or non-urgent with high accuracy.
Norwood has an ongoing maintenance contract with Spark to provide feature enhancements and upgrades to the visual voicemail service.
Spark is currently migrating all existing voicemail users (prepaid and postpaid) over to its new voicemail platform, with the rollout taking place over the next three months. At the completion of the migration phase, the visual voicemail service will be made available to Spark’s mobile customer base.
Norwood’s CEO and Founder, Paul Ostergaard, said the company was delighted to successfully deliver this advanced visual voicemail solution for Spark NZ.
We continue to demonstrate with our ongoing collaboration with Spark that Norwood can consistently deliver advanced, industrially-scalable and carrier-grade services that a telco-operator can rely on,” Mr Ostergaard said.
“I am pleased to see how well our deployment teams performed, interacting with Spark’s team and associated subcontractors, despite the COVID-19 pandemic affecting global travel. The project was deployed 100% remotely using online collaboration and software deployment tools. This demonstrates our capability and robustness as an offering, even for our on-premises deployment model.
“Spark will be an excellent reference implementation for our world-class telco voicemail offering,” he said.
Spark is New Zealand’s largest telecommunications and digital services company. Its customers range from consumers and households to small businesses, government and large enterprises. Across mobile, broadband, cloud, digital and entertainment – Spark has services that are relevant for almost every New Zealander.
