VON: VocalData wins in Delaware Valley

BOSTON--Wilmington Delaware-based DCANet will soon begin adding customers to its hosted PBX offering using VocalData’s VOISS IP application server, it announced announced at the Voice-on the-Net show yesterday. VocalData also announced support for several new IP phones and enhancements to its overall platform.

DCANet, which serves parts of Pennsylvania and Delaware with various broadband connectivity, including DSL and T1 service, now will be offering voice-over-IP and unified messaging using VocalData’s VOISS. The former ISP's first customer will be a private university in Delaware who will use IP Centrex service.

VocalData will allow DCANet to offer a wider range of IP phones since it also announced today support for seven new devices. VocalData now supports the Cisco 7912, 7905 and 7903 models, which run using SCCP protocol. It also supports three phones from Japanese manufacturers Polypix, Hitachi and Nakayo, as well as the IP Blue VTGO-PC Lite Softphone.

“The most costly per-user element with IP is the phone,” said Mark Whittier, vice president of corporate marketing at VocalData. “This gives service providers more flexibility to offer lower priced phones.”

The new Cisco phones address the lower end of the market while the Japanese-made phones are helping VocalData serve the 25,000 lines it supports through a partnership with NTT Comware. IP Blue phones serve the mobile business market.

With its new range of supported equipment, VocalData now supports all four major protocols: SIP, MGCP, SCCP and MiNet. “It would be great if the whole world would settle on one or two protocols but in the meantime we have to give service providers all the choices they want,” Whittier said.

In addition to new phone support, VocalData announced an enhancement to its VOISS product, a simplified system administrator designed to emulate Microsoft’s Windows Explorer. It allows for better remote administration, lets administrators provision users and their mailboxes in bulk, and is now customizable by the service providers.

“We went to great lengths to enhance our administration. It is no longer proprietary and the administration tasks can be passed down the distribution chain so the reseller can have access,” Whittier said.

VocalData’s VOISS supports both internally developed applications such as voice mail, but also works with a service provider's existing systems, Whittier said. “We continue to use open standards even though we have our own applications so we can work with large carriers with their own embedded applications,” he said.