READING, U.K. -- Today, alwaysON, the leading UK next-generation voice, data and mobile telephony service provider, announces the UK’s largest IP Centrex roll-out to date. In a major contract worth at least £4 million, alwaysON, on behalf of Avanta Managed Services, a leading UK managed offices provider, has agreed to provide virtual telephony to more than 5,000 tenants at Avanta’s 20 sites. In addition, Avanta and its tenants benefit from cheap national and international call rates.

alwaysON won the contract against heavy competition from leading IP PBX vendors including Avaya, Mitel, Cisco and service provider Inclarity. By choosing alwaysON’s IP Centrex solution, Avanta estimates it has saved at least £1.4 million annually on PBX maintenance costs alone as well as a high initial equipment acquisition and installation expenditure on PBX hardware.

George Zaremba, CEO, alwaysON, said: “We welcome Avanta as a forward-looking customer to the benefits of IP Centrex and virtual telephony. alwaysON was able to demonstrate its ability to reduce the risk on this sizable project through our unrivalled experience of operating converged networks. alwaysON looks forward to working in partnership with Avanta over this year and beyond as the solution is rolled out.”

In a separate release:

Today, alwaysON, the leading UK next-generation voice, data and mobile telephony service provider, announces the launch of Virtual Telephony. This new sophisticated telephony service provides PBX replacement services and geographical number allocation to IP phones, enabling users to keep their existing numbers and receive incoming calls exactly as they do with standard BT lines. Based on technologies from Sylantro Systems, Virtual Telephony now makes PBXs and BT lines obsolete.

Virtual Telephony is the next-generation telephony solution for businesses of all sizes, from the small and medium enterprise to the largest of corporations. Using a broadband (xDSL) or higher speed connection to deliver phone calls, it offers free on-net calls, reduced calling costs to offline destinations worldwide, abbreviated dialling between multiple locations, together with a variety of advanced calling features which go beyond the standard PBX feature set. More, Virtual Telephony eliminates the need to buy costly PBXs, whilst also making expensive PBX maintenance costs just a bad memory. This revolutionary telephony solution is offered on both an alwaysON-branded and unbranded (“white-label”) basis, to resellers and partners including voice, data and business solution providers. Customers pay a low-cost monthly rate starting from about £15 per virtual telephony seat.

Advanced Telephony
As well as providing a full range of advanced PBX features, Virtual Telephony also offers unified messaging with advanced voicemail and fax-to-email capabilities embedded in Microsoft Outlook, multi-line support, and call management capabilities including follow-me, do not disturb and black list functions. The Web-based telephony solution also has an operator console to simplify the management and administration of incoming calls. Virtual Telephony is a natural extension of alwaysON’s private IP VPN services, which are in use today by over 30 customers in the UK.

Technology brief: IP Centrex
The technology behind alwaysON Virtual Telephony is alwaysON’s own next generation Operational Support System (OSS). Our advanced OSS enables partners and customers online to provision and manage telephony and network services including billing information. Recently, alwaysON integrated the next generation carrier class, IP Centrex application servers from Sylantro Systems. These servers are the first of their kind to be installed in the UK, enabling alwaysON to offer Virtual Telephony without the need for customers to purchase and install expensive IP PBXs on their premises. Since the technology behind the solution is located at alwaysON’s network operating centre, rather than in hardware sold to the customer, it is inherently scalable, with automatic upgrades that never require the purchase of new hardware or software.

‘With the substantial cost savings and clear customer benefits associated with Virtual Telephony, in a few years time, the PBX market will be suffering as businesses move en masse to Virtual Telephony’, said George Zaremba, alwaysON’s founder and CEO. Zaremba also stated, ‘With the first IP Centrex carrier-grade switch in the UK, alwaysON is the market leader in hosted, cost-effective virtual telephony services.’

‘The management team at alwaysON has a long history of innovation in providing voice communications, data services, virtual private networks and business applications for their customers,’ said Pete Bonee, president and CEO of Sylantro Systems. ‘Sylantro’s telco-grade IP Centrex applications are a natural extension of these critical business services, and offer business users a cost-effective alternative to buying and maintaining an in-house PBX system.’

In an additional release:

Sylantro Systems Corporation today announced that European service provider alwaysON has deployed its Virtual Telephony solution, a new service for business users that is based on Sylantro’s hosted communications applications and servers. The Virtual Telephony service offers a hosted alternative to buying and managing a PBX or other phone system for enterprise customers, and further expands upon other alwaysON offerings.

The alwaysON Virtual Telephony solution provides advanced features such as one-number service for calls, faxes and voice messages; a Web user interface with click-to-dial, call logs and phone redirection; follow-me, do not disturb and black list capabilities; and Outlook® integration.

“We’ve built our business upon best-fit and best-of-breed services, partners and vendors, all integrated and managed via our custom OSS solution,” said George Zaremba, alwaysON’s founder and CEO. “After extensive evaluation, we chose Sylantro as the basis for our Virtual Telephony service offering. The unique capabilities of Sylantro’s applications and platform, coupled with carrier-grade scalability and reliability, enable us to offer a complete, integrated package of IP-based services to our customers.”

The alwaysON Virtual Telephony service is based on technology from Sylantro Systems, the leading provider of IP Centrex and hosted communications applications and servers. Through the new service offering, alwaysON joins the ranks of SBC, Verizon, Level 3 and TeliaSonera in offering these types of advanced communications services for businesses.

“The management team at alwaysON has a long history of innovation in providing voice communications, data services, virtual private networks and business applications for their customers,” said Pete Bonee, president and CEO of Sylantro Systems. “Sylantro’s telco-grade IP Centrex applications are a natural extension of these critical business services, and offer business users a cost-effective alternative to buying and maintaining an in-house PBX system.”

AlwaysON

Sylantro Systems Corp.