For the vast majority of Africa, South Africa is the continent’s engine of economic and technical growth and in the VoIP field, Centracom has helped re-define efficiency for thousands of South African businesses.
From the start, Centracom’s business model attracted a wide range of clients from SMEs to large call centers. Its developing customer base caused it to focus on growth and high traffic volumes; to have better control over its operations, Centracom decided to acquire its own VoIP switch.
Once we made the decision to purchase a softswitch, we generated a list of requirements that quickly became quite long. Our primary needs were for a tried and tested system, built with leading technology, which would cover both our billing and switching functions. The only solution we found that could satisfy these and every other requirement we had, was PortaSwitch.
Michael Aitken, Centracom’s Managing Director
As the flagship product from PortaOne, PortaSwitch meets the needs of Internet Telephony Service Providers in countries around the world. Its Class 4/5 SIP softswitch, integrated media applications, and converged billing/provisioning capabilities enable both retail and wholesale users to deploy and manage virtually any kind of next-generation telecom service, from Cloud PBX to Skype-class video calling.
We chose PortaSwitch knowing it could give us the flexibility we needed for our present and future product offerings. It has the power to give us a central point from which we can manage our business – specifically our network and billing functions across for our VoIP clients, and provides us with billing features for our newly developed Cloud Solution and Connectivity offerings.
Michael Aitken, Centracom’s Managing Director
PortaSwitch’s unique architecture is a true competitive advantage. It is easy to configure initially, and provides maximum stability and reliability on a day-to-day basis. One of the technical innovations we’re most proud of is our three-tiered network failover protection – and PortaSwitch is engineered to support that point of difference for us.
Michael Aitken, Centracom’s Managing Director
Because Centracom is considered a VoIP innovator in South Africa, it is continually on the lookout for new ways to better meet customer needs. From voice logging to cloud-based voice recording, call-logging, TMS and even next generation products like Centracom’s Random Number Generator, Centracom is known for convenient voice and data services that help its business users become more productive and efficient. Aitken says that PortaSwitch helps support his company’s reputation for exceptional pricing, high call quality, and advanced features.
Our company philosophy is to think in the future. It’s only by constantly looking, and thinking, ahead that we remain ahead. By embracing the changing needs in the telecom field, we sustain our reputation and our competitiveness. PortaSwitch is a big part of our strategy.
Michael Aitken, Centracom’s Managing Director
About Centracom
Founded in 2008, Centracom is known as the country’s “carrier of carriers” for its partnerships with multiple VoIP and Data networks. Its ability to route voice and data in the most cost-effective fashion enables Centracom to lower costs, increase uptime, and ensure the highest quality of service to its business customers.
About Zero Downtime Updates
Central to PortaSwitch’s appeal is its central configuration server. Supporting all other servers and related components, the configuration server not only provides logging storage for the broader system, thereby removing the analytical task loads from the application servers, but also maximizes efficiency for platform updates. New maintenance releases, for example, are managed via a dual software management system in which updates are received and processed in a “local” partition. At the specific time the new partition is marked “active,” the server is restarted using the new version of the code. The strategy minimizes downtime as well as chances for incompatibility with existing components.
