Case Study: TruHome

Founded in 2004, TruHome is an award-winning mortgage credit union service organization that provides a full range of private-label services to credit unions nationwide. TruHome leverages the power of collaboration that already exists in the industry to provide full-service originations, secondary marketing and servicing solutions.

The company began as a business unit of a larger company, relying on their IT infrastructure and self-hosted telephony solution. As TruHome matured and grew to operate autonomously, it had a critical need to institutionalize itself as a fully standalone enterprise and that meant building out its own back-office functions. It also needed its own telephony solution, which was being managed and controlled through a parent company.

“From its start, TruHome had a cloud-first mentality. It was natural we wanted to go all in on software-defined and cloud-delivered telephony via UCaaS and have someone else shoulder the burden of infrastructure,” said John Pentlin, Vice President of IT at TruHome. “Maintaining a focus on UCaaS from the get-go meant we could build a system that decoupled us from on-premise and geographic carrier-based circuits.”

Pentlin had to first convince the company’s leadership team on his approach. The company’s leaders knew they had a single point of failure in their phone system. If the phones were down, their call centers weren’t operating so they wanted to know how moving to the cloud would solve that problem.

“Our business leaders had call center backgrounds, so they understand both the importance and the challenges of telephony.” said Pentlin. “Half of our employees operate out of two call centers, so reliable telephony is critical to us because every minute our phones are down half of our workforce is unable to do their jobs.”

Pentlin knew that even the best telephony software would not operate well if a solid network foundation wasn’t in place. He and his team looked to SD-WAN to accelerate the decoupling from their parent company, but quickly discovered that not all SD-WAN vendors adhere to the definition of the technology itself.

Originally, TruHome started down the path with one SD-WAN vendor it thought would be the safe bet to provide the call quality the company required. Pentlin liked the proposed delivery methodology, but the rollout ran into a brick wall when the solution didn’t live up to their sales pitch. After talking with the SD-WAN vendor’s engineering, it became clear that they had oversold the ease of the insertion topology and couldn’t provide the high availability that Pentlin was looking for.

The vendor couldn’t facilitate TruHome’s solution the way Pentlin wanted without blowing up their cost model. What’s more, the topology would’ve forced TruHome to over design its edge network. It couldn’t provide proper high availability and introduced a single point of failure into the network.

“It’s one thing to run your data applications on ISP circuits and your telephony on a standard carrier separately,” Pentlin explained. “If one is down, some operations can still continue. When you are running data and telephony needs over the same solution, that means you must up the ante on your edge network and data circuits. It means you need a topology that allows you to leverage multiple diverse carriers and solves every outage scenario you can throw at it, not just the ones you think to write policies for.”