From its inception in 2005, alternative telecommunications provider Kalaam Telecom quickly gained a foothold in the Bahraini business community by offering the most advanced voice, data, and value-added services, with competitive pricing and the highest service standards. Its business model, which is tailored to the needs of both SMBs and large corporations in specific industry segments, enabled it to gain prominence among telcos in the Middle Eastern nation.
When Kalaam Telecom acquired Lightspeed Communications (a subsidiary of Orange-France Telecom Group) in 2014, the company became the second largest business ISP for fixed wired broadband services in the Kingdom of Bahrain. In the process, however, Kalaam Telecom acquired a technology that would play a central role in its next phase of growth.
Entering our tenth year of operations, the goal was to distinguish ourselves by providing customized solution ecosystems to our business users. Our use of PortaSwitch is giving us the ability to customize products based on our customers’ needs.
Veer Passi, Kalaam Telecom’s chief executive officer
PortaSwitch, the communication services and subscriber management software at the core of Lightspeed Communications’ infrastructure, was identified by Kalaam Telecom engineers as a platform that could significantly impact the larger company’s service mix. PortaSwitch, from PortaOne, provides the means to deliver not only converged billing, provisioning and SIP call control, but also a wide range of valuable customer-facing solutions such as including unified messaging, IP Centrex and hosted IP PBX, callback management, IVRs, conferencing and more.
Many of our business customers are in Bahrain’s primary industry segments – banking, finance, manufacturing, hospitality, education, retail and government. PortaSwitch is of great value in helping us develop focused solutions for enterprises in these various segments.
Veer Passi, Kalaam Telecom’s chief executive officer
PortaSwitch has allowed us to add features such as fax-to-email and unified messaging – especially a follow-me service – to our product portfolio. From an internal operations standpoint, PortaSwitch is very easy for us to use. It has an intuitive, user-friendly interface. Moreover, the product is well-supported by a great technical staff.
Mahmoud Al Shamlan, Kalaam Telecom’s head of network operations
Since leveraging PortaSwitch as a result of the Lightspeed acquisition, Kalaam Telecom has added a number of new features to the market that have increased its value with enterprise customers, including PABX (Private Automated Branch eXchange) services. Importantly, PortaSwitch has allowed the company to uncover additional sources of revenue; its new wholesale offerings, spanning broadband, wholesale voice, MPLS, IP transit and more, are all made possible through the platform.
We’ve been using PortaSwitch for almost four years now, and the main reason we do so is because it can serve all aspects of our business. Thanks to the simplicity of PortaSwitch, we have no limitations in providing the perfect solution for our customers.
Mahmoud Al Shamlan, Kalaam Telecom’s head of network operations
About Kalaam Telecom
As the first, alternative and fully-licensed telecommunications provider based in the Kingdom of Bahrain, Kalaam Telecom offers advanced voice, internet, data, and value added services to business customers. Having launched operations in March 2005, Kalaam serves both small & medium business customers and large corporations across different industries in Bahrain. Our policy of openness and frankness is central to our management’s philosophy.
A key indicator has been the amount of renewed and continuous business awarded to Kalaam over the past six years.Kalaam’s network is a state-of-art Next Generation Network (NGN) deployment, capable of supporting both traditional and non-traditional voice traffic. With direct interconnects to than 30 operators worldwide and direct routes to more than 150 countries, Kalaam Telecom continues to provide the best alternative voice and data services in the region.