Steve’s Tech Journal

Lavalife was honored to receive a Silver Award for Innovation at the Canadian Information Productivity Awards ceremony held on Nov 1. This organization annually recognizes outstanding achievement in the IT fields, and these awards are prestigious accomplishments in the Canadian IT industry.

As many of you know, this was a project that I initiated in 2003 and that I led over the last 3 years in conjunction with Lavalife’s CTO George Howitt. We achieved dramatic business results, that are reported on in the official CIPA article. Here are two excerpts:

By converting billions of minutes of IVR Personals traffic from legacy telecommunications infrastructures to VoIP and processing them centrally, the new solution replaced 25 platforms in cities across North America. In one fell swoop, the new solution reduced costs and improved efficiency in a number of categories and also removed long-standing technology constraints, enabling the business to expand into new geographic areas.

Today, all traffic is captured locally by a telco and delivered centrally to Lavalife’s IVR applications as an inbound VoIP stream over a private IP network. The systems are generic servers, with no proprietary hardware components or associated custom low-level software.

and

The solution has produced equipment savings estimated at $3.8 million. Approximately $250,000 in hardware costs and $400,000 in software costs replaced almost $4.5 million worth of production hardware.

…

For its exceptional application of information technology to solve real-world business problems, Lavalife Corp. has been awarded a 2006 CIPA Silver Award of Excellence in the Innovation, For Profit category.

We were lucky in that we had great vendors in Allstream, Level(3) and Vail Systems, and the resulting infrastructure has been rock solid and efficient.

I also have to say a word of thanks into Jeff Pulver and his team at PulverMedia. It was at their VON trade shows that I learned much of what I needed to know for this project, and where I made all of the key connections to vendors and partners.

Internally, George and I had a fantastic implementation team that was as energized and excited about the project as we were.

Lastly, for me I want to say that opportunities like this come along just a few times in one’s career. We rebuilt the company’s infrastructure from the ground up on a totally new technology base. We were the early adopters, the project was difficult at times, but we made it happen. As a result the company enjoyed great business rewards, and to receive this recognition in the industry is just icing on the cake.

Technorati Tags: CIPA, Lavalife, VoIP, Allstream, Vail Systems, Level3, Pulver, VON