PortaOne Announces PortaSwitch Maintenance Release 22, Unveils 'Long-Life' Designation for Qualifying Releases

COQUITLAM, British Columbia, Aug. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Global communications software company PortaOne, Inc. today announced PortaSwitch Maintenance Release 22 (MR22), a major new release of the company's flagship VoIP call control and subscriber management platform.  Featuring a number of important upgrades that add value and performance for customers and service providers alike, MR22 is now available to current PortaSwitch owners for field testing, with no additional license fee required.  

Concurrent with today's announcement, PortaOne is also unveiling a new "long-life" designation for sanctioned prior releases of PortaSwitch.  "Long-Life" denotes the most stable version of PortaSwitch that will be supported with bug fixes, minor improvements and other software support for an extended period of time, enabling customers to better plan the evolution of their PortaSwitch systems.  

"Long-life" status will be assigned to certain maintenance releases only after extensive field test in real commercial operations.  A new maintenance release, such as MR22, may gain "long-life" status after going through several consecutive builds and providing its long-term stability.  Effective immediately, the "long-life" designation is applied to Maintenance Release 20, the last version of PortaSwitch to run on the FreeBSD operating system.

PortaSwitch MR22 brings a number of new performance features to PortaOne's innovative platform that is capable of handling the complete call control and converged VoIP billing functions of a diversified digital services company.  The 64-bit Oracle Enterprise Linux product consists of a real-time billing system, class 4 and 5 SIP softswitch, and application servers that deliver converged VoIP billing and provisioning, SIP call control, unified messaging, IP Centrex and hosted IP PBX, callback management, IVRs, conferencing and more.

New to PortaSwitch via Maintenance Release 22 are the following:

Users can now see where a forwarded call comes from.  Going far beyond the typical Caller ID readout, Visible Call Forwarding allows hosted IP PBX users to see the source of forwarded calls.  Operators and receptionists who receive calls for multiple companies, for example, are now able to greet callers with the correct information based on the intended corporate destination of the call; employees who are substituting for colleagues can answer a call from a sales queue differently from calls forwarded from a technical support queue.

PortaSwitch capacity to process registration attempts doubles.  A new capability in the SIP proxy for PortaSIP, PortaSwitch's Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) softswitch, enables caching of successful registration information.

Under normal circumstances, when an IP phone goes online it provides PortaSwitch with information about its current location on the Internet; the new capability doubles PortaSwitch's ability to process registration attempts on a per-second basis, thus better protecting the system from a "registration storm" that is either unintended or part of a denial-of-service attack.

iPhone users can playback their voicemails.  A convenient new feature for businesspeople, MP3 voicemail is an addition to traditional WAV recording that allows voicemails attached to outgoing email to be played on new MP3-compliant platforms such as iPhones.  A license for three "ports" will be provided by PortaOne free of charge to all customers upgrading to MR22, enabling up to three voicemails to be converted to the MP3 format simultaneously (licenses for additional ports can be obtained by contacting the PortaOne sales team).

PIN-less customers will enjoy higher level of security.  A new layer of protection for residential VoIP users, password protection ensures that popular PIN-less dialing services based on outgoing ANI or CLI are not spoofed.  Part of the PortaUM prepaid calling component of PortaSwitch, the new feature prompts customers for their password before allowing access to such services.  The improvement allows service providers to gain a competitive advantage when rolling out dialing services and to offer these services to a larger customer group.

User reports improve.  Enables users to quickly see desired subtotals in the system's custom reports.  Useful for situations including cost/revenue summaries where providers wish to see breakouts for each customer.

Service providers can share revenue with their customers.  Payback rates enable service providers to attract customers by allowing them to receive credits for incoming calls from other PSTN networks.  In the payback scenario, service providers receive revenue from other telcos for terminating a call to the provider's network, thus allowing them to share revenue with the end-user.

Clients can call through PortaSwitch directly from their mobile phones.  Thanks to a new partnership with WLCom, PortaSwitch now interoperates with the WLCom Mobile Communication Client, enabling calls to be made from the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms.  The addition lets end users employ a single phone and unified list of contacts while still saving on long distance and international calls.

"PortaOne's service goal has always been to keep our customers at the very forefront of the fast-changing VoIP industry.  We believe the debut of MR22, as well as our new 'long-term' designation, will provide a comprehensive and powerful development path for any PortaSwitch user," said Andriy Zhylenko, chief technical officer for PortaOne.

All current PortaSwitch owners whose staging platforms are covered by PortaOne's PortaCare technical support program are eligible to obtain MR22 for testing purposes.  Minimum hardware and software requirements, listed at http://portaone.com/hw, are the same as for full commercial installations.  

Users who already have a staging license can simply contact their PortaOne support team; to order a new staging license, interested users should write to [email protected].

About PortaOne:

Based in Canada, PortaOne is a leading global vendor and developer of carrier grade software for modern telecommunication service providers.  The company enables service providers and carriers to run a broad line of retail and wholesale telecommunication services with a single software package, and offers a complete product consisting of converged VoIP billing and service provisioning platform, class 4 and 5 SIP softswitch to support hosted IPPBX or IP Centrex services, unified messaging, IVR, conferencing applications, callbacks, calling cards and more.  The company's products are a fundamental part of the business infrastructure at over 330 service provider locations worldwide.  To learn more, visit www.portaone.com.

SOURCE PortaOne