SONALAKE winning the Enterprise Solution of the Year Award by Connected Britain

This year’s Connected Britain 2024 event was an absolute blast for our team, and we are beyond thrilled that our One Touch Switching solution pivOTS™ was honoured with the Enterprise Solution of the Year Award. This prestigious recognition reaffirms our commitment to delivering cutting-edge solutions that meet the evolving needs of the telecommunications industry.

We could not be more thankful for the close collaboration of our customers who helped us deliver a solution perfectly aligned with the industry's needs. We want to give a special shout-out to Zen Internet, G.Network, Fibrenest, and LilaConnect UK for joining us at our booth at Connected Britain and helping us celebrate winning this award!

Background: 

The ability for broadband customers to easily switch between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is a huge positive for the telecoms industry and will result in a very positive customer experience, growing awareness and trust in the choices available to the residential market. 

Interestingly, the UK’s One Touch Switch (OTS) approach to broadband switching is the most automated and complex across markets in Europe to date. It requires all ISPs to make their customer/service inventory available to be matched on a 24x7 basis, and it is inclusive of a 60-second SLA for the losing provider to communicate the results of a match request and the implications of switching to the customer. 

However, this advanced approach, with a complex set of APIs, security protocols and strict performance guarantees, does present an onerous challenge to ISPs, from small to large. As a result it caused delays in the rollout, with CSPs struggling to interface with TOTSCo - the special purpose company created to build and manage a centralised Hub for the exchange of switch messages. TOTSCo in turn approved a number of “MAPS” to assist ISPs with various technical approaches.

Having engaged in the OTS ecosystem from the start and becoming a MAP, Sonalake made a large R&D investment to create pivOTS™, a high quality productised solution that minimises the effort required for ISPs to meet their OTS regulatory obligations. 

pivOTS™ is deployed rapidly within an ISPs own IT environment, allowing the ISP to stay in control of their customer data and providing a high degree of protection from accidental or unauthorized attempts to access customer data. It abstracts the OTS challenge away from core systems including CRMs, while keeping them up to date with customer switch progress. pivOTS™ thus reinforces CRM’s central role as master of customer communications.

In addition to managing the complex backend TOTSCo communication, pivOTS™ includes a front End User Interface to enable CSP agents to gain customers without integration to the CRM, and to view and approve switch order triggers when losing customers, as well as dealing with any edge cases. 

pivOTS™ is cloud agnostic and has been deployed on Azure, AWS and GCP. It includes an active roadmap in line with evolving TOTSCo specifications, including GPLB for business switching.

A unique aspect of pivOTS™ is the online Dev Centre which has been highly acclaimed by CSP customers. The pivOTS™ software is downloadable from the Dev Centra which also provides extensive OTS technical and business support resources, complimented by an expert Sonalake support team.

pivOTS™ has been adopted by several CSPs who have provided excellent feedback to Sonalake and have made themselves available as reference clients.The best proof of Sonalake’s success with pivOTS™ can be measured by the performance of its users in achieving the TOTSCo testing milestones and thus being ready for OTS go-live in September.