24 June 2022

BNS Group Achieves 100% Cloud Migration and Saves 50% On Ongoing IT Costs

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory – Australia’s leading Enterprise SMS text messaging software developer has left the world of physical data centres behind and partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to fully migrate both the business and its technology solutions into a cloud environment.

Starting its business in 1989 developing fax server software, BNS added enterprise SMS text messaging server software to its product offering in 2009.   Today BNS Group provides enterprise SIP based FAX and SMS communications cloud based software solutions to some of Australia’s leading government agencies and corporations.

In a significant restructuring of the business operations and client infrastructure, BNS Group has achieved what many similarly placed organisations have not; 100% migration to a cloud-based environment.

Following months of research and discussion, Co-Founders Laurence Buchanan and Clive Pereira focused on simplicity and efficiency in their move to AWS, opting to build new virtual machines and relicensing software development tools rather than what other organisations appeared to be doing, in migrating, lifting, and shifting.

What appeared to be a significant obstacle in replacing their physical Optus SIP trunk in the data centre was made easy with Switch Connect CEO Rohan Milne, who commissioned a hosted session border controller supporting T.38 Fax protocol, resulting in BNS Group’s AWS-based fax technology being able to talk directly to Switch Connect.

“Replacing the Optus SIP trunk in the data centre was probably the most complex part of our migration. We had to find a reliable cloud based T.38 service to the PSTN for our fax server technology to use. As Switch Connect was handling our MS Teams PSTN calling already, this was just an easy addition to our monthly service plan” said Laurence Buchanan CEO BNS.

About BNS Group:

BNS Group is a privately owned company based in Sydney and Canberra focused on secure enterprise FAX and SMS messaging. BNS manufactures commercial software products on the Windows platform which are licenced to customers and reseller partners globally.

BNS’s customers include Australian Taxation Office, Defence, Computershare, Panalpina Freight, Suncorp Group: Suncorp Bank and Insurance, AAMI, GIO & Shannons.

BNS has been a certified Microsoft developer partner since the early 1990’s.

To learn more about BNS Group, visit

https://www.bnsgroup.com.au/about/

About AWS ISV Accelerate Program:

The AWS ISV Accelerate Program is a co-sell program for organisations that provide software solutions that run on or integrate with AWS. The program helps you drive new business and accelerate sales cycles by connecting participating independent software vendors (ISVs) with the AWS Sales organisation.

To learn more about AWS ISV Accelerate Program, visit https://aws.amazon.com/partners/programs/isv-accelerate

Media Contact:

Laurence Buchanan
Tel. +61 412 869 531
Email: ceo@bnsgroup.com.au

24 May 2022 BNS Group Leaves Physical Data Centre Behind To Join Global Community Of Amazon Web Services Partners

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory – BNS Group, Australia’s leading SMS and Fax software developer for government and private firms, has left the world of physical data centres saving its clients time, money, and providing them SMS service provider flexibility. Upon partnering with Amazon Web Services, BNS has fully migrated its entire technology suite to the cloud in under two months.

Co-founders Laurence Buchanan and Clive Pereira had been discussing the importance of offering their clients a solution based in the cloud for years, utilising either AWS or Microsoft Azure, however it was a new client, technology start-up Praisal, that eventually forced the duo into action.

An off-market residential listing marketplace, Praisal needed a way to connect with its users, monthly, to update them on the total number of digital rings, the views their property accumulated, and distribute leads to property professionals.

“Ultimately, the decision was made for us when we were approached by Praisal,” said Clive Pereira, also Technical Director at BNS Group. “Praisal wanted to launch a progressive web app that runs on phones and runs on desktops and they wanted to deploy out of AWS. They asked the question of BNS… ‘What can you do? What can you do with SMS that can run in our tenancy?’” said Pereira.

Pereira continued, “We had a solution that was running on premise, but they wanted us to provide something that we didn’t have and that was to be able to take requests from SQL. That got us thinking, ‘Hey, why can’t we drop our traditional mechanism, which was an email type feed mechanism and go to SQL?’ That’s what got us thinking about not only SQL, but also about running in AWS.”

Following months of beta testing and collaboration with Praisal, BNS Group were able to successfully deploy their SMS technology via AWS and have it verified with AWS’s ISV Accelerate Program, making the solution even more attractive to enterprise organisations who utilise SMS as a means of communication.

Laurence Buchanan, also Chief Executive Officer, quotes the open standards approach as a key benefit of their solution. “In taking an open standards approach, the customer can now negotiate the cost of their SMSs because they can move from one service provider to another without having to re-engineer.” he said.

“Their software developers do it once and once only.” Buchanan continued. “They don’t have to go and change, and they’re not using proprietary APIs. For example, if they’re locked into Telstra and they use the Telstra rest API just to send and receive SMSs, then they’re locked into Telstra. They don’t have that flexibility. With our platform, they do.” he concluded.

For enterprises interested in the SMS solution, the application will shortly be listed within the AWS Marketplace as a part of the Accelerate Program, with BNS Group spent 6 months documenting the architecture, deployment guides and prerequisites for installation. In the interim, BNS Group can provide guidance on system compatibility.

About BNS Group:

BNS Group is a privately owned company based in Sydney and Canberra focused on secure enterprise FAX and SMS messaging. BNS manufactures commercial software products on the Windows platform which are licenced to customers and reseller partners globally.

BNS’s customers include Australian Taxation Office, Defence, Computershare, Panalpina Freight, Suncorp Group: Suncorp Bank and Insurance, AAMI, GIO, and Shannons.

BNS has been a certified Microsoft developer partner since the early 1990’s and are a certified AWS ISV Partner as of 2022.

To learn more about BNS Group, visit

https://www.bnsgroup.com.au/about/

About AWS Partner Network:

The AWS Partner Network (APN) is a global community of partners that leverages programs, expertise, and resources to build, market, and sell customer offerings. This diverse network features 100,000 partners from more than 150 countries.

To learn more about AWS Partner Network, visit

https://aws.amazon.com/partners/

About Praisal:

Praisal is an off-market residential listing marketplace, where owners can create a listing for free and buyers can digitally ring their doorbell to express an interest in the property.

To learn more about Praisal, visit

https://www.praisal.com.au/

About AWS ISV Accelerate Program:

The AWS ISV Accelerate Program is a co-sell program for organisations that provide software solutions that run on or integrate with AWS. The program helps you drive new business and accelerate sales cycles by connecting participating independent software vendors (ISVs) with the AWS Sales organisation.

To learn more about AWS ISV Accelerate Program, visit https://aws.amazon.com/partners/programs/isv-accelerate

Media Contact:

Laurence Buchanan
Tel. +61 412 869 531
Email: ceo@bnsgroup.com.au

Photo Credit: @vibe.imagery

1 February 2022, BNS and Switch Connect announce the availability of a cloud-based T.38 fax service to solve the issues customers face when migrating away from legacy telephony to solutions such as Microsoft Teams PSTN Calling.

BNS first identified the problem customers were facing in 2020 when customers were fast-tracking Microsoft Teams for remote working and collaboration. Some of those customers decided to implement PSTN calling for Teams but found no fax capability and could not completely replace their old PBX systems.

Customers, particularly in: healthcare, finance, banking, insurance, and government, need to ensure that fax data handling complies with privacy and data sovereignty laws in Australia, so outsourcing fax to a provider is not allowed.

The solution was for BNS to find a suitable service provider who could deliver a SIP service to any cloud provider specifically designed for enterprise faxing;  then couple that with the BNS Fax server technology within the customer’s cloud tenancy.

“We selected Switch Connect because they offered a Ribbon Software-based SBC in their cloud, which was co-located at a tier 1 telecommunications provider in Australia,” said Laurence Buchanan, CEO of BNS.

BNS being a Ribbon partner for many years with SBCs, which it had deployed in large accounts over the years, was confident that the solution would work.

The design allows the customer to implement the BNS Fax server in their own cloud tenancy (AWS, Azure, etc) and utilise reliable SIP communications to Switch Connect, who can deliver fax over the service with minimal jitter or latency.

“BNS has been a Teams Calling customer of ours for a while, and we were constantly discussing the issues with fax and Microsoft Teams; we got to a point of saying we just need to build something that works and is reliable for our customers and also for BNS’s legacy on-premise customers,” said Rohan Milne Switch Connect CEO.

The solution allows:

• The customer to maintain complete control and security of their fax images because nothing is stored at Switch Connect (SC).
• SC can host existing 1800\1300 fax numbers
• SC can host existing normal fax numbers subject to porting capabilities at the customer end.

Switch Connect can also provide Teams PSTN calling as a service for customers wanting a PSTN service for their Teams implementation.

Technical information is available at https://msxfaxkb.bnsgroup.com.au/switchconnectt38service

BNS Group website:  www.bnsgroup.com.au

Switch Connect website: www.switchconnect.com.au

August 2021, Sydney Australia

Microsoft System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM)  is a key component of Microsoft’s System Centre solution used for: deployment, configuration, management and monitoring of infrastructure and virtualised software-defined datacentres.

With IT staff working from home, SMS alerts from core network management platforms is becoming more important.    Microsoft System Centre Operations Manager can manage critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange email.  SCOM can be used with the SMS Server to securely notify engineers via text messages.

The standard SCOM offering from Microsoft uses modems which are not allowed to be connected to most corporate and government networks for security reasons.

msXsms enterprise SMS server does not use modem but instead  uses secure encrypted industry standard SMPP\TLS over the Internet to SMS aggregators such as SINCH and MessageMedia.

The SMS Server software runs on Windows Server which can be deployed in Azure\AWS if required.

For more information, refer to: https://msxsmskb.bnsgroup.com.au/scom_get_started

August 2021, Sydney Australia.

BNS confirms interoperability between msXfax Enterprise fax server with Ribbon Communications SBC SweLite version 9.0.2 and TPG Telecom SIP voice service.

T.38 fax over IP is used between the fax server and SweLite allowing the fax server to be deployed in Azure\AWS or the customer’s data centre.

SweLite performs transcoding between T.38 and G711a.

Refer to https://msxfaxkb.bnsgroup.com.au/sip-telephony for further information.

For more information on Ribbon Communications Inc refer to: www.ribboncommunications.com

For more information on TPG Telecom refer to: www.tpgtelecom.com.au

BNS completed T.38 transcoding tests with Ribbon Session Border Controller Software Edition Lite (SBC SWe Lite).   SWe Lite version 9.0.2 Build 295 was tested with msXfax build 29 (XCAPI 3.6.100) in April 2021 using Optus Evolve voice SIP Trunk connected to a Hyper-V host.

SWe Lite provides best-in-class communications security with the convenience of deployment from the Azure Marketplace or on popular virtual machine platforms The SBC SWe Lite delivers:

• VoIP Security (topology hiding, encryption, protection against Denial of Service attacks, and more.
• Interoperability with leading PBXs, cloud UC services, SIP endpoints, and SIP trunking providers.
• Certified for Microsoft Teams Direct Routing
• Advanced call routing features such as Active Directory/LDAP server routing integration and onboard call forking.
• Powerful media services are included.
• Efficient architecture that uses fewer software resources, reducing the cost to deploy.

msXfax

msXsms

BNS Group announces support for the new Microsoft Graph API to securely access Office 365 resources.

Microsoft Graph is the gateway to data and intelligence in Microsoft 365. It provides a unified programmability model that independent software vendors (ISV) can use to access the tremendous amount of data in Microsoft 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security. Use the wealth of data in Microsoft Graph to build apps for organizations and consumers that interact with millions of users.

“Older protocols such as IMAP are slowly being locked down by Microsoft meaning that ISVs have to implement the most secure access and move with the times” said Clive Pereira BNS R&D Director.

BNS’s enterprise fax server is the first product to be updated to implement the API.

msXfax Enterprise Fax Server version 8.3 build 29 provides support for the Graph API available from March 2021.