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Introduction:
This national 911 Service Provider provides outsourced emergency telephone services to all major U.S. wireline, wireless, and VoIP carriers, large international operators and a growing number of public safety agencies and municipalities in the U.S. and abroad

Business Objective:
The value of an emergency services systems provider is closely linked to the value of its data. When providing emergency services, fast access to accurate customer data is vital, any latency could have serious repurcussions. This customer data includes names, addresses, and primary spoken language. With this information, a 911 service provider has the information needed to send emergency service personnel, such as ambulance, police, or fire departments.

Business Challenge:
Access to fast, reliable customer information is vital for public safety agencies to deliver saving services to citizens. This emergency service provider must make it straightforward for its customers (telecoms operators) to provide feeds of customer information into its systems.

The national service provider needs to continually monitor and update the customer profiles in order to deliver an accurate and timely service to safety agencies. With a large number of mobile and VOIP phone users, without accurate user details, [name, address, first spoken language, etc.] valuable time and resources can be wasted, with potentially serious consequences.

Technical Challenge:
The system involves very large feeds of customer information, such as name and address, up-to-the-minute location and first language, being fed from telecoms providers to the emergency services provider system. These feeds are received constantly and many megabytes in size, are formatted as XML and importantly need to be processed instantaneously. Any latency could mean that customer information in the emergency service provider system is "stale".

Data privacy concerns are also paramount given that telecoms operators do not want their customer details falling into the wrong hands. Also, of course, government privacy laws forbid disclosure of customer names, addresses, and other contact information.

This service provider implemented an XML based application infrastructure built on the Oracle application server to integrate the regular feed and exchange of customer profile information with telecoms companies and the public safety agencies. Delays in the processing of information were occurring due to the dependency on a general-purpose application environment for the processing of end user information and the enforcement of safety related policies. These delays were unacceptable to operations staff.

Benefits/Results:
By implementing Vordel XML Gateway, the service provider was able to remove the delays incurred in the processing of XML messages and accelerate the overall throughput and delivery of services. The centralization of all XML processing in the Vordel appliance was the key to the successful management of this infrastructure. Vordel was able to accelerate the throughput of the large XML files and provided the ability to centrally apply policy rules governing the usage of this information.

Ultimately, the Vordel solution ensured that the critical account information and policies essential to the delivery of accurate and timely emergency support services. The central management features delivered by Vordel also enabled the 911 service provider to update existing and introduce new policies in a much more scalable manner than heretofore, without the costly overhead of hard-coding policies into the applications themselves.