Telarix Replaces Crystal Reports with Logi Info and Reduces Costs and Maintenance while Increasing Profitability and Developer Productivity and Helping Global Telecom Carriers Maximize Profitability

About Telarix

Telarix, Inc. delivers the leading Interconnect Business Optimization (IBO) software solution, which allows telecommunications companies to easily manage costs and drive profitability on their inter-connect traffic. These solutions allow global telecommunications carriers to maximize profitability by leveraging operational intelligence and enable real-time business decisions.

Telecommunications and content service providers are faced with a market environment that is characterized by rapid technological change, evolving regulatory requirements caused by worldwide de-regulation, and shrinking margins. An expanding array of services such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and wireless services, along with the exponential increase of providers, rising operations costs and competitively influenced price cuts, have created a critical need for rapid business decisions that drive carrier profitability.

Service provider executives must manage complex, rapidly changing relationships to deliver cost-effective, high-quality domestic and international call delivery. The bottomline results of efficiently managing both front-end and back-end telecommunications operations are undeniable. Legacy system investments and complex business rules, however, have limited a carrier's ability to deploy systems that are needed to
manage the new global call transaction environment effectively.

Telarix is solving this problem for carriers through its iXTools software suite. iXTools delivers near real-time business intelligence (BI) about operational transactions. Carriers can quickly and easily adopt low rates to international destinations, manage costs and overflows on existing routes, identify capacity opportunities on low-cost routes, and ensure voice integrity.

Using iXTools, carriers can also eliminate or resolve disputes almost before they occur. Telarix's extensive expertise in the interconnect market coupled with their extensive experience with global Tier-1 carriers such as Global Crossing, BellSouth, and Embratel, ensure that Telarix clients will benefit from a rapid deployment of Web-based solutions that leverage existing call detail records to deliver a whole new level of decision-making capabilities to business executives.

The Challenge

Telarix initially relied on Crystal Reports for its reporting needs. However, product support and pricing issues prompted Telarix CTO, Shawn Zargham, and Director of Software Development, Marian Floor to search for an alternative solution. They decided to replace their legacy reporting system with a more robust and cost-effective reporting and analysis solution.

"Crystal Reports required significant maintenance," said Marian Floor. "The pricing structure also changed, making it more expensive and harder to manage licensing. We needed a more cost-effective product that would be easier to maintain. Ultimately, we wanted to provide our customers with the best solution available."

Telarix customers rely on Telarix solutions to perform near real-time reporting, routing and billing functions and to track financial and network information that is used for executive level decision-making. Knowing their clients' needs and the importance of the information that their iXTools software suite provides, the Telarix
engineering team faced a significant challenge when Telarix decided to replace its legacy reporting system.

Migrating away from legacy reporting systems demands considerable research and planning. A chosen replacement solution must meet and exceed the requirements of the legacy system as well as exceed the expectations of clients and other end users. Cognizant of these needs, Zargham, Floor and the Telarix engineering team, compared a number of reporting products against a list of nine criteria for selection.

"We needed a product that would add to the functionality that we had already been providing to our customers and that would be scalable for their needs," said Floor. "We compiled our list of criteria based on our foreseeable long term requirements and selected the solution based on the following criteria:

• Easily fit into the given infrastructure
• Efficiency with near real time reporting on large amounts of data
• OLAP reporting and analysis - on the fly grouping of certain criteria
• Extensive charting and graphing capabilities
• Export to Excel, PDF, and CSV
• Printing capabilities
• Ability to easily toggle between the report and the application
• Dynamic Sorting and drill down capabilities
• A match to our security environment

The Solution

Telarix selected LogiXML's Logi Info. Shawn Zargham and Marian Floor specifically liked Logi Info for its ease of integration and overall product quality.

"We chose Logi Info because it met the criteria we needed to provide our customers with the high performance that they have come to expect from Telarix," said Marian Floor.

"Logi Info is generally more robust than Crystal Reports and it lets us develop reports that are easier to maintain. It fit easily into our
infrastructure and provided functionality that we did not have before. Logi Info also provided dynamic sorting, which was something that other reporting services did not provide easily."

Logi Info's extensive drill-down reporting capabilities also proved valuable for Floor and her team.

"Logi Info has strong drill-down functionality that allows for a large amount of data in the drill-down reports. Previously, we had to limit the amount of data that could be analyzed within a report to provide acceptable performance" said Floor. "For practical reasons, we were limited to three levels of data and once we reached those three levels, it became very complicated to work with that data. Logi Info's drill-down capabilities allowed us to interact with the data in its entirety."

"We were also restricted to 13 filters, mostly because managing the code became very difficult. Logi Info has eliminated those restrictions, and we now use more filters regularly."

The Results

LogiXML's Logi Info has helped Telarix boost development productivity, reduce unscheduled maintenance, and reduce costs while creating a robust and easy to use reporting environment for
clients.

Improved Development Productivity and Less Maintenance

According to Marian Floor, LogiXML's modeling approach has helped Telarix to improve development productivity. Logi Info leverages an XML-based element driven architecture and a drag and drop user interface that work together to shorten and simplify development processes and remove developers from extensive coding.

"LogiXML's modeling approach enables more efficiency among the development team by allowing us to make rapid global changes to
different elements and attributes easily. Logi Info allows you to manipulate the underlying XML code in addition to using the drag and drop feature, so that we can make changes once and eliminate repetitive processes."

Shalabh Singhania, one of Telarix's Product Managers, agrees and adds that maintaining and debugging reports has improved with Logi Info. "The development process with Logi Info is far easier than the report development process using Crystal Reports," said Singhania. "It is very easy to see your report definition in Logi Info's Report Studio. The XML code makes everything hierarchical, and you can see the tree structure very easily within the Studio. The XML-based layout makes it logically very quick and easy to interact with and replicate code."

"Logi Info is also easier to maintain and debug. Previously, it was very difficult to resolve most issues. We could never get to the heart of problems. Logi Info simplifies the entire development process. We can perform queries in only two steps, for instance, which makes debugging very easy. Additionally, Logi Info gives us more control to make changes to existing objects. Small changes are easy to make. You can add to or modify Logi Info reports very easily."

Added Value for Customers

According to Shawn Zargham, Telarix's CTO, Logi Info's functionality has also helped Telarix add value for their customers.

"Our clients are very happy with the report functionality that Logi Info makes available to them," said Zargham. "Logi Info allows them to sort by any field, and the reports are much easier for them to use. The functionality lets them play with the data as they like without going back into filters. The analysis is now much more intuitive, and users can sort at any level."

Reduced Costs and Increased Profitability

Zargham also says that adopting Logi Info has further enhanced Telarix's profitability. "We have recorded significant savings related to the integration of Logi Info that are based on reduced development cycles and easier post release maintenance," said Zargham. "Our customers are large telecommunications companies that need data-intensive reporting to identify whether their business is being run in the most optimal way. LogiXML has helped us to provide that information to our clients and has made our development process more efficient."

"We are very happy with LogiXML's products and services," continued Zargham. "Their technical support has always been excellent. They have always come through for us."