The telecommunications world is a much different place in 2015 than it was in 2007. The decline in on-premises PBX, historic growth in smartphone share, and emergence of cloud-based services are just a few of the technology revolutions that have radically altered business models and given birth to whole new industry segments.
After eight years of telecom transformation, UK-based ICC Networks has not only maintained, but expanded the customer base for its flagship product, Active SoftSwitch, by combining a flexible service layer with a rock solid, carrier-grade call control and customer billing foundation. The secret that has enabled Active SoftSwitch to thrive after years of customer and industry evolution, ICC Networks says, is PortaOne’s PortaSwitch Procinctus.
As far back as 2005, ICC Networks was looking for a hosted, white label SIP service that would allow us to attack a niche in the B2B market. The solution did not exist at that time, so we realized we had an opportunity to create it.
Steve Rowles, ICC’s Managing Director
PortaSwitch Procinctus had its roots in billing services, so all the heavy lifting in that area had already been done for us. All the issues around call management, routing and authentication were in place, which allowed us to be more creative with the solutions we could build around PortaOne’s technology.
Steve Rowles, ICC’s Managing Director
PortaSwitch Procinctus is a unique platform comprised of a highly optimized and expanded version of PortaBilling, PortaOne’s billing services product, combined with two PortaSIP media and softswitch clusters. The infrastructure, connected via a configuration server for easy management as well as faster updates, allows ITSPs to unify voice, data, fax, content, SMS, and WiFi traffic within a single converged network.
PortaSwitch Procinctus has a redundant multi-server structure, which helps to make Active SoftSwitch very resilient. It’s multi-lingual and the billing engine is multi-currency. Finally, the support relationship is exceptional. PortaSwitch Procinctus makes our product highly marketable.
Steve Rowles, ICC’s Managing Director
With PortaOne’s platform at its core, Active SoftSwitch has given ICC Networks a leading position with telcos and unified communications service providers in the UK, continental Europe and beyond. The company’s customers offer a wide range of services ranging Centrex, conference services, local number and mobile services for business users to calling card, callback and call shop services to the residential market.
Most recently, ICC Networks released Active SoftSwitch 3.0 which, in addition to enhancements to the content management system, includes a new virtual numbers module that allows customers to directly order direct dial numbers. Almost 60 fully integrated widgets and apps are available for Active SoftSwitch—all of which tie back to PortaSwitch Procinctus through the API.
We’re very clear in our product literature for Active SoftSwitch that the service is built upon PortaOne infrastructure. PortaOne’s reputation gives our product additional credibility and offers peace-of-mind to our customers. By building Active SoftSwitch on a softswitch and billing solution we could trust, we’ve been able to focus on developing our product to meet the changing needs of our customers. Over time this has helped keep us in front of the competition.
Steve Rowles, ICC’s Managing Director
About Active SoftSwitch
Active SoftSwitch, the product ICC Networks eventually created, is a White-Label VoIP telecom service platform offered to independent telcos seeking a carrier-grade solution at an affordable price. By combining the renowned stability and scalability of PortaSwitch Procinctus with its own service specific content management service wrapper, the company knew it could capture a great number of ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Provider) accounts not only in the UK, but also throughout Europe.
