Connection manager for integrating legacy telephony environments and IP networks

In a telephony call management system, a method of distributing calls among a plurality of packet-based load balancing resources comprising:

• receiving over a telephony channel a call request specifying call information;
• determining based upon the call information a set of parameters, the set of parameters comprising a call termination point, time that the call request is received, telephony channel over which the call request is received, a telephony communications protocol according to which the call request is received, and a priority parameter associated with the call request;
• in a first format conversion, parsing said call information to remove unnecessary protocol-specific overhead and converting a format of said call information, the format based upon a resource-specific protocol, into an internal format;
• detecting a presence of the plurality of packet-based load balancing resources by monitoring activities of the plurality of packet-based load balancing resources associated with the telephony communications protocol to detect an availability of at least one packet-based load balancing resource to resolve the call request in view of the presence and the telephony communications protocol;
• registering the plurality of packet-based load balancing resources in order of the presence, wherein the presence determines whether said call information is converted from the internal format to another format in a secondary format conversion and prevents processing of the secondary format conversion for unavailable load balance resources;
• comparing the call information with selection criteria to select one of a plurality of packet-based load balancing resources in the order of presence based upon at least one parameter contained in the set of parameters determined from the call information;
• querying the selected packet-based load balancing resource in the order of presence to resolve the call request;
• and
• receiving a response from the selected packet-based load balancing resource indicating whether the call request can be resolved;
• if the call request was not resolved, selecting and querying subsequent ones of the plurality of packet-based load balancing resources in the order of presence until no further load balancing resources are left to be queried or until the call request is resolved;
• and
• if the call request was resolved, in the second format conversion, converting said call information from the internal format into another format based upon a protocol utilized by the selected load balancing resource or a subsequently selected load balancing resource;
• wherein the selection criteria specifies a priority order for call requests based on the telephony protocol.