PortaOne's VoIP and billing solutions are built using open source software, and are provided with access to the full source code.

by Jeff Goldman [July 5, 2006]

PortaOne was founded in 1999 as a project group of the Norwegian telco Telenor, working to develop a new VoIP billing and customer care platform. PortaOne was founded as a separate company, to focus on developing advanced VoIP billing solutions, after some successful project development by a Telenor project group. The company's flagship billing solution is PortaBilling.

Still, PortaOne's focus reaches far beyond just billing. It's all about enabling ITSPs (Internet Telephony Service Providers) to provide—and charge for—a complete VoIP solution, using the company's PortaSIP, PortaUM (Unified Messaging), and PortaSwitch products.

PortaOne ((866) 747 8647 (international: +1 604 628 2508) contact@portaone.com

PortaSwitch is the umbrella VoIP solution, intended to be what the company calls "the ultimate Communication Service and Subscriber management Platform, directly addressing the next-generation requirements of ITSPs." Composed of a softswitch and application server, it's designed as a turnkey replacement for Class 4 and 5 switches.

Roman Khalenkov, the company's Sales and Marketing Director, says the fact that PortaBilling meets the challenge of billing for voice over IP means that it can be used to bill for just about anything. "We have a client which uses the software to bill for hotel reservations," he says. "It's very, very flexible, and it can be used for an extremely large number of different scenarios."

Limitless licensing
PortaBilling's functionality covers both prepaid and postpaid billing, and is fully integrated with the company's VoIP products. Khalenkov says PortaBilling offers just about every feature an ITSP could think of. "It's very, very hard to find something it doesn't include—and if you do find something, you probably don't need it," he says.

All of PortaOne's products, Khalenkov says, are provided with the full source code. "You can add any additional features or modifications—it's extremely flexible," he says. "You can do it yourself, you can find an outsourcing company, or you can ask PortaOne to develop it for you. I would say a third of our customers would like some extra features to be developed, and we do that for them."

Another key strength of the company's software, Khalenkov says, is the fact that it comes with an unlimited license. "The majority of other solutions charge per customer, per port or per minute billed," he says. "So when an ITSP progresses and becomes a bigger business, their software limits them because they pay more and more for the software they use. In the case of our products, it's only a one-time investment."

The same is true for the product's ASP option, which allows ITSPs to host and resell access to the application to other providers. "You can provide termination, billing and softswitch for a monthly charge—and you can resell to an unlimited number of companies," Khalenkov says.

Every software license purchase comes with training at the customer location, post installation monitoring, six months of upgrades and 24/7 tech support, after which support and maintenance contracts are available for an annual fee. "We have approximately two to three maintenance upgrades during the year," Khalenkov says.

Benefits of open source
Jody Schnarr is President of the Canadian ISP 295.ca, as well as the long-distance company Worldline. Until recently, the company used a billing system it had developed in-house, but Scharr says they recently switched to PortaOne's solutions for both companies. "With PortaSwitch, PortaSIP and PortaUM, it really made a lot of sense for us to buy their whole system and merge everything together," he says.

Before choosing PortaOne, Schnarr says, the company looked at a wide range of different billing systems. "One of the biggest points that overshadowed any other option was that they use open source products," he says. "The database is open—it's MySQL—and they use Apache and FreeBSD and Perl. I've been in situations where I've had vendors that have closed, and I've been out of the loop: it's their code, it's proprietary, and I can't get inside. In this case, I have all the code, and I can do whatever I want with it."

And the unlimited pricing model, he says, is another key benefit. "The voice over IP product is a SIP switch, it has Vonage-type services, but the pricing model is such that when you buy it, you pay for the code and you can use it as much as you want," Schnarr says. "We have 70,000 users we're porting over to the system, and we add 5,000 users a month—other billing solutions can get very expensive for somebody who's adding on customers."

— End