New Bi-Monthly Delivery Schedule will Assure Faster Deployment of Features and Capabilities; Company Also Announces Two New Classes of Release for Improved Upgrade Planning

PortaOne today announced several major changes to its software maintenance release program. The changes, which include a new bi-monthly delivery schedule and two tiers of releases involving feature rollouts and stability fixes, will bring an even greater level of customer service to the company’s popular suite of VoIP subscriber management and billing products.

Highlights of PortaOne’s new maintenance release program include:

• Bi-Monthly Releases: To assure faster and more predictable rollout of new features and modules, PortaOne is adopting a new guaranteed delivery schedule. Releases will now be issued on a standardized schedule of every two months or less. Unlike the company’s prior “minimum cluster” approach, which resulted in deliveries of larger releases on a sliding schedule, the new system will reduce the average wait time between feature requests and their final deployment.
• “Leap Forward” and “Stable”: PortaOne will now be offering its maintenance releases in two classes: Leap Forward and Stable. Leap Forward releases will involve new functionality, while Stable will focus on improved system stability. By breaking releases into these two classes, customers can better plan their upgrades to address individual needs.
• Rollback Capability: Leap Forward releases will be issued as an initial software build followed by a single “improvement” build to address any issues that are reported. Stable releases, which will be supported for a longer time than Leap Forward releases, will include multiple improvement builds as well as a “jump” upgrade from one stable release to the next. This new strategy will allow customers adopting both Leap Forward and Stable upgrades to immediately roll back to a previous release if issues are encountered.

“PortaOne’s new program is part of our ongoing effort to create the most responsive software support capability possible,” said Andriy Zhylenko, Chief Technical Officer for PortaOne. “This improvement will allow us, as well as our customers, to react quicker to changing market needs.” Zhylenko noted that other changes, such as a dedicated daily automated testing facility and improved tools for managing source code versions, commits and code reviews, will be invisible to customers but will also result in higher product quality.

PortaOne’s new program will apply to all its telecom infrastructure products including PortaSwitch, our flagship product.

Compatibility of DIDWW with PortaOne’s VoIP Billing/Subscriber Management Platform Assures Service Providers of Reliable DID/Virtual Number Capability in Over 60 Countries

PortaOne and DIDWW today announced the successful completion of interoperability testing between PortaOne’s PortaSwitch VoIP billing/subscriber management platform with DIDWW’s global Direct Inward Dialing (DID) access solutions. Together, the two companies are able to assure telecom carriers and resellers of a complete, end-to-end DID service lineup in over 60 countries on five continents.

The interoperability of DIDWW with PortaSwitch brings additional value to resellers and greatly simplifies operations for carriers and service providers using PortaSwitch. As a software-based communications services and subscriber management platform, PortaSwitch lets IP telephony service providers deliver a wide variety of business models quickly and flexibly. The comprehensive, Class 5 product includes a softswitch and application servers, and provides billing and provisioning, SIP call control, unified messaging, IP Centrex and IP PBX, voice VPN, callback management, conferencing and more.

“In an age when simplicity in call dialing is more important than ever, DIDWW offers an indispensable suite of services to providers and end users,” said Roman Khalenkov, sales and marketing director for PortaOne. “We’re pleased that DIDWW’s infrastructure is proven to operate seamlessly with PortaSwitch, as it will deliver valuable new options to PortaSwitch customers.”

“DIDWW is always seeking software and platform vendors from around the world who offer best-of-breed technology that complements DIDWW’s products,” noted Yuri Krichevsky, CTO at DIDWW. “The combined expertise in VoIP products and systems of PortaOne and DIDWW, as well as our two companies’ in-depth industry experience, allows us to deliver proven, interoperable and complete solutions to our customers.”

PortaOne Users Now Able to Make Assured SIP Interconnect to the Colt VoIP Network; Flexibility of PortaSwitch Infrastructure Allows High Degree of Customization

WorldCall, a Belgium-based provider of VoIP infrastructure services, and PortaOne, maker of the PortaSwitch VoIP infrastructure system, today announced that PortaSwitch has been formally certified for interoperability with the VoIP network offering from Colt, Europe’s leading information delivery platform. WorldCall, a major PortaSwitch user, supplied essential technical resources to ensure successful completion of the interoperability testing.

With the certification, PortaSwitch users worldwide are now able to make assured SIP interconnection to the proprietary, Intranet-based VoIP network of Colt, one of the world’s largest Tier 1 VoIP operators. PortaSwitch is now published as a formally certified PBX (Private Branch eXchange) solution within Colt.

Long considered one of the industry’s most reliable and scalable call management systems, PortaSwitch is an integrated package that includes a class 4/5 SIP softswitch, billing and provisioning, SIP call control, unified messaging, IP Centrex, callback management, conferencing, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), conferencing and more. The platform is capable of handling the complete call control and converged VoIP billing functions of a diversified digital services company.

“Today’s announcement offers an unusually attractive new alternative to any PortaSwitch user seeking to reliably connect to Colt VoIP Access,” said Alex Grichine, WorldCall Manager. “PortaSwitch interoperability allows these users to establish direct SIP interconnect with any Colt regional office worldwide, without additional effort. Together, these systems will provide one of the most robust, dependable and feature-rich VoIP PBX solutions on the market today.”

“At PortaOne, our mission is to deliver the ultimate in reliability to our corporate partners and their end users. Certified interoperability with Colt’s Intranet VoIP is one more way we can extend that trust to the farthest reaches of their telephony systems,” said Roman Khalenkov, Sales and Marketing Director for PortaOne. “We’re grateful to WorldCall for initiating the process that made this important interoperability possible.”

WorldCall, a diversified VoIP services provider with customers in 43 countries, has enhanced PortaSwitch with its own set of proprietary services. Chief among these is Porta Toolbox, a suite that includes intelligent, real-time call routing and cost/revenue reporting. WorldCall has also developed a callshop billing system for PortaSwitch that supports push-to-talk, pre-paid and post-paid call scenarios and a multi-language user interface, among other features.

PortaOne employs over 100 developers and IT professionals in Ukraine. Next month, PortaOne will sponsor of the fifth joint conference YAPC::Russia — YAPC::Russia™ 2012 «May Perl™ + Perl Mova™» to be held in Kiev on May 12-13, 2012.

Perl Mova (Perl Language) is the annual Ukrainian Perl workshop which covers Perl trends, presents new technologies, and helps to exchange the experience between developers. May Perl is the name of the Russian Perl conference taking place together with Perl Mova this year.

The Yet Another Perl Conferences (YAPCs) are grassroots symposia on the Perl programming language promoted by The Perl Foundation, a non-profit corporation dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code.

The YAPC conferences are held since 1999 and combine several branches: YAPC::NA (North America), YAPC::Asia, YAPC::Brasil, YAPC::Russia, and YAPC::Europe. Despite of the original geographical division, people from all over the world visit every conference.

For more information please visit the conference web site.

The development for PortaSwitch Maintenance Release 25 has been completed, verified by QA, and is now available for all PortaCare customers. For a safe environment to test the new MR25 features, we strongly recommend customers to deploy it on a staging system prior to updating their production installations.

Below is a list of selected new features and enhancements to the existing functionality in PortaSwitch Maintenance Release 25:

• PortaBilling Maintenance Release 25 replaces the original MySQL (Standard Edition) with Percona MySQL as the database server for improved performance and stability.

• Anti-Fraud Tools. The fraud protection module in PortaSwitch uses an innovative fraud detection and prevention method based on analyzing deviations from the location where the service is used (geo-IP). This enables prevention of the majority of attacks without allowing a single fraudulent call to pass through, so there is zero loss for the service provider (or the customer).

• “Phone Book” for each phone line. Now each account (a phone line) has an ability to maintain its own set of frequently dialed numbers and assign speed dial codes to them. This provides more flexibility for end-users and, since this list is also used to maintain the list of numbers to which a special “favorite” rate applies, it reduces the amount of work for PortaSwitch administrators.

  Now, in order to allow calls to a certain number to be rated as “favorite”, the administrator does not need to enter the whole number; instead, the checkbox next to it needs to be checked.

• Voiceover Announcements. Calling card services introduced many new enhancements compared to traditional home phone service, such as being able to hear your current balance, or how long you can talk for based on this balance, at the beginning of a call. Residential VoIP initially followed the traditional telephony (POTS) service model: pick up the handset, dial, get connected, talk.

  To make the service even better, PortaSwitch now allows the introduction of prepaid card calling features (such as announcing the maximum allowed call duration at the beginning of the call, or announcing that the call is about to be disconnected) to the traditional residential VoIP service.

• On-Demand DID Provisioning. This method allows service providers to vastly expand DID number coverage area and dramatically reduce the costs of DID acquisition while maintaining 100% profitability. Instead of purchasing large ranges of numbers in advance, an administrator or end-user can access the PortaBilling web interface to browse through an inventory of DID numbers available in various countries and areas.

  When a specific number is requested, PortaBilling allocates that number on the DID provider network and provisions it to the customer’s account. The customer is then charged based on the actual DID cost plus the markup rate. Since the service provider can now work with multiple DID vendors and offer DID numbers from virtually any country and area on the planet, this adds a significant competitive advantage to the service offer.

• Auto-Provisioning Support for additional models of IP phones. Recent additions include Polycom IP331, IP335, IP650, IP670, IP5000 and IP6000 phones.

• SMS Services Integration Framework. In order to allow easy integration with various aggregators or carriers for transporting SMS messages, the messaging module in PortaSwitch has been redesigned and improved.

  When PortaSwitch user needs an interconnection with a new SMS provider, all what is required is an additional plug-in module to take care of the actual communication with the provider’s server and the correct data encoding.

• Bandwidth-Aware Limitation of Allowed Concurrent Calls. In order to guarantee a constant adequate quality of service in a situation where a customer’s Internet connection has limited bandwidth, it is important to consider not only the total number of already established concurrent calls but also how much bandwidth each one consumes (the actual amount of bandwidth depends on the codec used and other parameters).

  A new addition to the call control module allows the administrator to split all phone lines of the IP Centrex environment into one or more “sites” with each site representing phone lines used in the same location, and then specify call limitations in terms of the available bandwidth. This way PortaSwitch can correctly determine whether a specific site can place or receive additional calls.

• Billing by ANI (CLI). While normally calls are rated based on the destination number, in some situations (e.g. charging the owner of a toll-free number for incoming calls) the caller’s number must be used to calculate the billing charges (e.g. toll-free number costs are higher if the call originated in Alaska than in the 48 contiguous states). This method is now fully supported, thus allowing service providers to offer a full set of incoming DID services, including toll-free DIDs.