AdaCore Helps Singo Solution Implement Scalable, Robust Call Management System
Improved quality, reliability, and performance in new Blaze product
NEW YORK and PARIS, April 19, 2011 – AdaCore, a leading supplier of Ada development tools and support services, today announced that Singo Solution, Inc., a global provider of specialized call-center solutions, selected the Ada programming language and GNAT Pro Development Environment to build Blaze - one of the largest, most innovative call management systems. Blaze is a comprehensive, scalable, web-enabled VoIP dialing platform that manages customer interactions via phone lines and a variety of other electronic methods of communication. The system is already being used in both traditional and non-traditional call center applications around the world, including healthcare, cable and telecommunications, utilities, insurance and many others.
When work started on the Blaze product, Singo realized that its own C-based call detection algorithm, and the many complicated contact management functions, were too time consuming and costly to maintain, and that enhancing them would not be practical, so the company decided to start from scratch. They knew that the programming language choice was critical, and decided early on that Ada was the best available language for producing code with the expressiveness, speed, and - most importantly - the reliability needed for a call center system of Blaze’s magnitude.
“We know we made the right decision in choosing Ada, because it is simply more robust than any other language available,” said Sieu Ngo, President and CEO, Singo Solution, Inc. “The code is efficient, but it is also extremely readable and maintainable. It helped us get our code done right the first time.”
As a strongly typed language, Ada detects at compile time many errors that would only be found during testing and integration in a language such as C. This allows developers to spend their time enhancing the core software with new features and functions, versus trying to figure out why things aren’t working. One of Ada’s distinguishing features is its support for concurrency.
Concurrency is inherent in the Singo Blaze call center software logic: many different calls come in, are routed, and are handled all at the same time. Singo found Ada’s tasking a natural solution for the system’s concurrency requirements, and was able to achieve key objectives of efficiency and reliability.
Efficiency
Ada’s tasking implementation automatically takes advantage of multi-core platforms. As the number of cores increases, the operating system can automatically exploit the additional processing power by allocating tasks to the new cores, with a resultant speedup in system performance.Reliability
With Ada’s tasking model, data corruption errors can be prevented by defining the shared data structures as protected objects. The Ada tasking implementation ensures that when a protected object is being modified, this operation is executed with mutual exclusion.
To implement the Blaze Call Management System, Singo selected AdaCore’s GNAT Pro Ada Development Environment. The GNAT Pro product offers a modern, professional software build environment and tool-chain that scale up to handle very large systems. Most importantly, GNAT Pro is backed by expert support services provided by the product developers themselves. GNAT Pro is available on more native and embedded platforms than any other Ada environment, and is widely used to write applications with the most demanding reliability, safety and/or security requirements.
In developing the Blaze system, Singo used several AdaCore products that complement the GNAT Pro toolset. One is the Ada Web Server (AWS) technology, which supports development of web-based graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The new GUI allowed new users to be instantly productive where past systems almost always required some training prior to use. Another AdaCore product heavily used in Blaze is PolyOrb, which supports CORBA distributed communications. Much like the basic architecture where Ada tasking can take advantage of the number of cores, Blaze can handle an increasing number of phone lines, nodes within the CORBA implementation, without needing to be rebuilt. If the number of lines increase as a call center grows, new memory can be added to the hardware to support new nodes. Thus Blaze is highly scalable, handling a range from just a few call lines to upwards of hundreds of thousands if required.
“Singo finds magic bullet to program Blaze system!’ Well not exactly, there are no magic bullets in the programming world despite many claims,” said Robert Dewar, AdaCore President and CEO. “What they did discover (or rediscover) was that the Ada language and the GNAT Pro toolset built around it made a big difference. Singo has become an enthusiastic Ada supporter after finding that using Ada reduced the effort to build the product compared with competitors using other languages, and they successfully implemented a call-management system that is reliable, flexible, and efficient. Ada has been used widely for critical systems in domains like avionics and air traffic control, and Singo found that its advantages apply equally to the commercial arena. Ada may not be a magic bullet, but it does provide real benefits, and in the world of programming we need all the help we can get!”
About AdaCore
Founded in 1994, AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial software solutions for Ada, a state-of-the-art programming language designed for large, long-lived applications where safety, security, and reliability are critical. AdaCore's flagship product is the GNAT Pro development environment, which comes with expert on-line support and is available on more platforms than any other Ada technology. AdaCore has an extensive world-wide customer base; see http://www.adacore.com/home/company/customers/ for further information.
Ada and GNAT Pro continue to see a growing usage in high-integrity and safety-certified applications, including commercial aircraft avionics, military systems, air traffic management/control, railroad systems, and medical devices, and in security-sensitive domains such as financial services.
AdaCore has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. www.adacore.com
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