Equinox Information Systems
Headquarters Location:  1309 Briarville Road, Madison, TN 37115
www.equinoxis.com

Q: What does your company do and how long has it been in operation?
A: Since 1986, Nashville-based Equinox Information Systems has been providing affordable, reliable business assurance solutions to virtually every sector of the telecom industry, including cable telephony, wireless, wireline, rural independent, CLEC and wholesale providers around the globe. Equinox’s solutions target business challenges that affect profitability and network efficiency, including revenue management, mediation, fraud management, expense management, routing assurance, network analysis and custom application development. Because our solutions can be scaled and configured to work with any network architecture, we are able to help a wide variety of customers in the telecommunications industry protect and optimize their revenue.

Q: To what do you attribute your company’s success in the communications industry?
A: Relationships. We focus on the relationships we have with our employees and our customers. While technology and industry regulations constantly change, we remain constant in our commitment to providing exceptional customer service and fostering long-term relationships with our customers. We start by taking great care of our employees, who in turn, take great care of our customers. We base all our business decisions on always doing the right thing—we take responsibility for our actions and communication, are honest in business negotiations, and empower employees so they can help customers on the spot. Our ultimate goal is to make sure customers are satisfied. If we are unable to make the customer happy, we do the right thing by giving them their money back.

Q: What have been the biggest obstacles your company has faced in the marketplace?
A: During our 26+ years in the industry, we have listened to and worked closely with our customers to create scalable, reliable, affordable solutions. As a result, we’ve served over 300 companies, including, most tier 2 U.S. carriers, six of the top 10 ILECS, five of the top 10 cable companies, and wireless carriers. Yet, in the million dollar advertising age, many folks may not realize all that Equinox has to offer or that we are able to help a wide variety of customers. However, our solutions’ market-proven track record for achieving strong bottom-line results for our customers has allowed us to sustain continued growth and success.

Q: What do you see as your greatest challenges going forward?
A: We strive to address real-world business challenges. We recognize that the profit margin is extremely tight in this industry, so a key challenge our customers face is protecting and optimizing their bottom line. A software feature is valuable only if it creates benefit in one of those two areas. We must apply our telecom experience to engineer solutions that respond to technological advancements rapidly, efficiently, and most importantly cost effectively.

Q: What have been some of your company’s most recent achievements (new customer wins, new service/product deployment, etc.)?
A: We constantly strive to optimize our applications to meet real-world business challenges by:

• Providing new solutions for wireless carriers, including data roaming validation, roaming imbalance reports, calling pattern analysis, and automated NRTRDE delivery.
• Increasing the list of supported data formats. Equinox supports 250+ formats, including the ASN.1 standard, TAP-3, AMA, EMI, VoIP/soft switches, class 4, class 5, SS7 formats, packet record formats, wireless switches and wholesale/UNE formats.
• Beginning relationships with new customers such as Union Telephone, SouthernLINC, SI Wireless, North State Communications, Wireless Maritime Services, Inteliquent, Telem Group, RGTS, PressONE, Velocity Networks and BEK.
• Adding a Routing Assurance module to TeleLink for generating least cost route guides, optimal route calculations, and what-if scenarios.
• Continuing to prove Protector’s ability to rapidly achieve and sustain a return on investment, regardless of ever-changing fraud schemes. Protector has saved carriers hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud losses.

Q: Why is it important for your company to be a COMPTEL member?
A: We highly value the relationships we have with our customers. COMPTEL gives us the opportunity to keep a close eye on the business and regulatory issues currently facing the telecom industry. Because many of our existing customers are also COMPTEL members, it allows us to understand the impact of such issues on them personally. Using this information, we can quickly and effectively support our customers.