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CENTRAL FLORIDA TELECOM SWITCHES TO PORTAONE, DISCOVERS RELIABILITY AFTER TWO CHALLENGING YEARS
No one has to tell Robert Riley and Keith Bruno how important credibility is to a young business. After seeing the emerging market opportunity and starting Central Florida Telecom (CFT) in 2011, the two partners quickly gained a foothold among its target customer base of businesses in and around Orlando, Florida. Many of these companies, from small entrepreneurial businesses to large corporations, were interested in saving money through CFT’s strong menu of VoIP telephony services.
Despite its quick success, however, a major problem was brewing behind the scenes. “Our initial softswitch vendor was failing us,” noted Riley. “The system they sold us was unreliable–and worse, it was unsupported. The licensing fees were becoming unreasonable, and certain features weren’t delivered as we were promised. It’s not like this could be ignored or minimized–the softswitch is the heart of our business.”
CFT struggled with the situation for two years, preoccupied with troubleshooting and patching a piece of critical infrastructure that, instead of being the cornerstone of their business, was becoming a millstone. After being mis-sold a second softswitch solution and with its reputation clearly at stake, the telecom made the difficult decision in late 2012 to drop its technology partner and seek a new softswitch vendor.
“Our drive to provide an excellent customer experience pointed us to PortaOne and its PortaSwitch platform,” said Bruno.
PortaSwitch, PortaOne’s flagship product, is a premier VoIP telecommunications services and subscriber management platform. Consisting of a real-time billing system, class 4/5 SIP softswitch, and media applications, the product is capable of handling the complete call control, routing, proxying, and converged VoIP billing functions of a diversified digital services company. It allows VoIP carriers and telecommunication service providers to deliver a wide variety of business models, quickly and flexibly.
“We quickly realized that PortaOne had given us the ability to expand our business to both a nationwide and international clientele,” stated Riley. “In addition to our improved billing and provisioning, IVR, voicemail and callback management, we could now offer new services such as calling cards and pin-less dialing. These kinds of services help us anticipate our customers’ changing needs and respond with features as they’re required.”
Since replacing its previous software with PortaSwitch, the CFT team reports it is able to spend less time troubleshooting and more time on business development. According to Bruno, “PortaSwitch has helped us help our customers achieve their goals and provided them with a solid, reliable solution. This has minimized issues with the phone system and has allowed us to pursue other business instead of fighting fires.”
Riley summarized his company’s transition to PortaSwitch as being “very painless,” and notes the ability of PortaOne’s combined softswitch/billing solution to deliver on the premium quality, business-class technology his customers demand. His highest praise, however, is reserved for the people at PortaOne.
“Whenever something is wrong, people are quick to complain–but many never take the time to say when something goes well. We would like to take the time to say what a pleasure it is to be a customer of PortaOne,” he commented. “So far our experience with the company and the product has been excellent. Everyone at every stage, from sales to applications engineers, trainers to technical support staff, has made our experience a very pleasurable one. We have had many issues over the last two years–but now we have a great system and excellent support. We hope to recoup these years and move forward.”
About PortaOne: Based in Canada, PortaOne is a leading global provider of software for the telecommunications and utility industries. The company’s products enable service providers and carriers to run a broad line of retail and wholesale services within a single software package. PortaOne’s flagship products, PortaSwitch (http://portaone.com/portaswitch/) and MetroBilling (www.MetroBilling.com) are a fundamental part of the business infrastructure for over 380 service providers and telcos in 80+ countries worldwide. Over two-thirds of PortaOne staff are support engineers providing the best-in-industry 24/7 technical support services for clients involved in hosted IP PBX and SIP trunking services, calling cards, wholesale origination and termination, residential triple-play, MVNO/MVNE, callshops and more. To learn more, visit www.PortaOne.com.