Telecom systems on open-source software and commodity servers.

Primus · Automated testing

A high-volume test harness on Linux

Direct Leap designed and delivered, on contract, an automated test harness for Primus’s consumer telecom services. Built on Linux and open-source telephony software running on commodity servers, it placed high volumes of real calls to verify the services, work that would otherwise have needed proprietary switching equipment.

Separately, as a services architect employed at Primus in 2005–2006, Simon Rowland designed and prototyped a softswitch-and-four-server replacement for about $20 million of Nortel DMS-500 long-distance switching, including the main post-paid long-distance IVR system.

Lavalife · Voice platform architecture · 2008

Consolidating a national telephone-dating network

Lavalife’s telephone dating service ran on separate voice-response, application and database servers in each region, a layout inherited from the era of expensive long distance. Each region stood alone, so a single server failure took that region off the air, and features could not span cities.

In March 2008 Direct Leap designed the architecture for a consolidated national platform on open-source software, and Lavalife’s own engineers implemented it. It used FreeSWITCH media servers behind OpenSER SIP proxies, a replicated PostgreSQL database, and open-source speech recognition and text-to-speech. Any server could handle any region’s calls, live calls survived the failure of a server, and Lavalife’s existing call scripts ran unchanged. The design included Direct Leap’s own answering-machine detection library.

National Commercial Bank Jamaica · Phone system design · 2007

An internal telephone system for a bank

In 2007 Direct Leap designed the internal phone system for National Commercial Bank Jamaica. As with Lavalife, the bank’s own staff carried out the implementation.

Consultronics · Test-equipment products

Designs and prototypes for telecom test equipment

Direct Leap designed and prototyped products for Consultronics, a maker of telecommunications test equipment.

Carriers and long-distance companies

Voicemail, IVR, SMS, billing and signal processing

For a range of carriers and long-distance companies, Direct Leap built voicemail servers, interactive voice-response applications, SMS systems and billing systems, and wrote digital signal-processing software. That signal-processing work produced the company’s answering-machine detection system. It told a live person from a machine with 99.6 per cent accuracy, reaching its decision within 60 milliseconds, and it ran inside Direct Leap’s own IVR polling services.

Union organizing · OPSEU · June 2016

Ontario’s part-time college workers

For the Ontario Public Service Employees Union’s drive to organize part-time support staff at all 24 Ontario community colleges, Direct Leap designed the contact approach and supplied the hosted call centre, the callers who staffed it and text-message delivery. It also built the call and text lists for each college. The colleges did not provide employee contact information, so the lists Direct Leap built were how organizers reached workers in the weeks around the vote.

Workers voted in June 2016. When the ballots were counted in January 2018, 84 per cent were in favour and roughly 20,000 people joined the union. OPSEU called it the largest union organizing drive in Canadian history.

OPSEU news release, 10 January 2018

Telemessaging · 2004 Canadian federal election

National voice broadcasting for a federal campaign

Direct Leap delivered a self-service voice-broadcast system for a national party’s 2004 federal election campaign, going from contract award to full service in under four months. The party’s staff ran their own broadcasts for event turnout, nomination meetings and get-out-the-vote calls, and the system went on to support thousands of local races.

IVR polling · Academic research · 2008–2009

District-level polling for Yale and Notre Dame field experiments

Direct Leap ran the polling for field experiments by Daniel Butler (Yale, Institution for Social and Policy Studies) and David Nickerson (Notre Dame). For the published study, the paper records that Direct Leap “conducted a large-scale automated phone survey” of registered voters in New Mexico over three days, 10 to 12 August 2008, collecting 10,690 valid responses: between 85 and 252 in every one of the state’s House districts, 153 on average. A randomly chosen half of the legislators were then sent the results for their own district before a special session, and they voted more in line with their constituents than those who were not.

What made the work unusual was its volume: 10,690 completed surveys in three days, with a usable sample in every district of a legislature, so that the results reached legislators before they voted. In May 2009, while both legislatures were sitting, Direct Leap fielded surveys of the same kind in Texas and Connecticut on consecutive days.

D. M. Butler and D. W. Nickerson, “Can Learning Constituency Opinion Affect How Legislators Vote? Results from a Field Experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 6(1), 2011, pp. 55–83. Full text (PDF) · Yale ISPS record

IVR polling · Research firms

Fieldwork for Canadian pollsters

The IVR system carried many studies for Environics and Research House, and riding-level polling with EKOS.