Politics and Technology

Aptela and BetterWorld recently joined hands to improve the communications infrastructure of the Obama-Biden Campaign for Change. While the team was in need of an emergency and cost-friendly solution on realizing the inefficiency of its present infrastructure across seven key states, both telecommunications companies came to its rescue as soon as they received phone calls from Team Obama.

"After receiving the call from the Obama Campaign in the election's closing weeks, BetterWorld quickly sprung into action and teamed up with its longtime hosted technology and VoIP network partner, Aptela," said Matt Bauer, president and co-founder, BetterWorld.

"Together, BetterWorld and Aptela were able to successfully formulate a technology solution for the Obama Campaign utilizing VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), Virtual PBX (News - Alert) (Private Branch Exchange) and Unified Communications by overlaying and enhancing the campaign's existing infrastructure, while increasing their ability to handle large, spiking call volumes, distributing the calls for volunteer operators, and most importantly, not issuing any busy signals to callers," Bauer added.

While Team Obama was unable to efficiently handle the influx of calls they received from key battlefield states of Wisconsin, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Hampshire, Montana and Nevada; their Public Voter and Volunteer hotlines called for immediate attention with Election Day being just two weeks away.

Both BetterWorld and Aptela pooled in their efforts to design and decide upon the essential setup that would help address infrastructural problems in one of the state campaign offices. They then reproduced the same framework in the remaining six campaign office locations. With less time on hand and no place for an error of any kind, the BetterWorld/Aptela team worked 24/7 to create a solution that was equipped with the features and functionality of a call center. With this infrastructural improvement, state offices across the seven states were able to handle calls from voters and volunteers efficiently, processing over ten times the calling volume they were capable of earlier.

"We thrive on helping each of our customers set up their hosted phone service quickly and affordably. This was a particularly exciting project for all of us and demonstrates our agility and responsiveness," said Larry Barker, President and chief executive officer of Aptela. "Working side-by-side with BetterWorld, we are proud to have been actively involved in the historic 2008 Presidential election process," Barker added.