Maintenance Release 21 Marks System’s Migration to 64-Bit Oracle Enterprise Linux; Upgrades Include CRM Integration, Call Recording, Configuration/Logging Server and More

PortaOne announces today PortaSwitch Maintenance Release 21 (MR21), a significant new version of our telecommunication services and subscriber management platform for telephony service providers. With PortaSwitch MR21, PortaOne delivers to its customers a number of new opportunities and benefits that bring greater robustness, easier management and operation, and enhanced profitability to their core telecom operations.

PortaSwitch MR21 is expected to be made available before the end of the year at no charge to subscribers of the company’s PortaCare 24/7 technical support and maintenance program. The upgraded product will be available to new PortaSwitch customers in January. Selected new features include:

64-Bit Oracle Enterprise Linux OS

With MR21, PortaSwitch migrates from the FreeBSD operating system to 64-bit Oracle Enterprise Linux, a professional-grade operating system that will bring an even higher level of robustness to the PortaSwitch platform. PortaSwitch users will benefit from the same OS used in PortaOne’s premium PortaBilling Oracularius product, along with carrier-grade support for ultra-modern hardware platforms and the ability to drastically increase performance by using large amounts of RAM.

Call Recording

PortaSwitch MR21’s call recording capability gives service providers an exciting new feature to offer their enterprise and SMB end-users. The capability, especially useful for medical or legal offices, can be deployed to any hosted IPPBX or IP Centrex system, and supports recording and playback on both incoming and outgoing calls. Recording can even be initiated in the middle of a call by dialing a special key combination on the phone’s keypad.

Softphone Client

PortaSwitch MR21 debuts PortaPhone, a new PC dialer/softphone client that supports PC-to-phone dialing. PortaPhone allows end-users to easily dial and receive calls from their computer screen, and gives service providers a strong feature base for increasingly popular PC-to-phone or Skype-like services .

New Configuration And Logging Server With Seamless Update

PortaSwitch MR21 introduces a brand-new unified management interface that also stores all configuration information. Through one interface, users can now control all other servers that compose PortaSwitch, even in large-scale deployments.

All new releases and builds of PortaSwitch can now be seamlessly distributed from the configuration server to individual servers — PortaSIP, for example — as an image, like the firmware images used in products such as Cisco gateways. Images can be applied to the server without affecting the current operation, becoming effective after reboot. Using the image procedure, migrations can be executed extremely quickly and with minimal downtime; what’s more, the previous image is preserved in case a rollback is required.

In addition to executing operations such as migrating applications from one server to another, the configuration server provides the ability to collect, process and store session logs (e.g. SIP messages exchanged between IP phones and the server) and other business critical data. This creates a useful analysis tool with no extra load on the production system.

CRM Integration

For some time, PortaOne customers have enjoyed the convenience of a CRM/ticketing system when communicating with the PortaOne support team. Now PortaSwitch offers the same capability for ITSPs managing trouble tickets involving end-users, thanks to the integrated bundling of RT (Request Tracker), an enterprise-grade ticketing system from Best Practical Solutions. RT manages customer requests via the Customer Info screen in PortaBilling100, where a list of the customer’s open tickets can be seen and accessed. Creating a new ticket requires just a single click .

“Maintenance upgrades for telecom products usually involve a few bug fixes and relatively mild performance improvements. PortaSwitch MR21 demonstrates our commitment to keep PortaSwitch at the top of the pack in reliability, usability and end-user value,” said Andriy Zhylenko, chief technical officer for PortaOne. “We believe our customers will appreciate the list of tangible features that will have real impact in their day-to-day operations.”

PortaSwitch is capable of handling the complete call control and converged VoIP billing functions of a diversified digital services company, enabling wholesale VoIP carriers and ITSPs to deliver a wide variety of business models quickly and flexibly. The comprehensive product consists of a real-time billing system, class 4/5 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.

Please contact us if you need more technical or pricing information about our PortaSwitch.