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For a company to maintain a lead in the market for 12 years is no small feat. When that company is a technology company, that kind of longevity can be a particularly rare bird. VoxNet S.A., meanwhile, recently celebrated that kind of longevity, and gave some of the credit to PortaOne, whose PortaSwitch platform gave the innovator a lot of help in terms of keeping up with various technology and market changes over the course of that period.

Thinking back to 2002, VoxNet's service might have seemed like a pipe dream. While the Internet was largely up and running, many of its familiar features simply did not yet exist, or existed in significantly different forms.  Major fixtures like YouTube (News - Alert) would remain largely dreams for another three years thereafter, and the idea of sending voice traffic over the Internet was an idea that had been tried, but wasn't going so well. Call quality in terms of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) was spotty to say the least, and could go on from there. But that was the market VoxNet stepped into, and the company was eager to make a name for itself by offering a high-quality product in a field where quality was commonly regarded as a serious issue.

First, VoxNet started out with prepaid cards, turning to PortaOne (News - Alert)'s PortaBilling system to drive VoxNet's TeleRabat line of calling cards. VoxNet was pleasantly surprised by PortaBilling's combination of low price and robust features, so when VoxNet started offering VoIP call origination under the name “AleNumer,” VoxNet once again turned to PortaOne, this time for the PortaSwitch system. With PortaSwitch, VoxNet got access to a set of tools in billing and softswitch technology that allowed for an easy connection to VoxNet's current Cisco (News - Alert) infrastructure. That made the expansion work quite well, and even allowed for the company to expand outward, offering new features to work with including unified messaging and interactive voice response (IVR) playback.

VoxNet's president, Marian Juskiewicz, offered up some comments on 12 years of working with PortaOne, saying “PortaSwitch provides the system expandability we need to support our customers in a complex environment with lots of different services. We focus on delivering services of the highest quality. It's very important for our customers to enjoy stable, continuous operation. PortaSwitch not only offers easy interoperability with different suppliers and types of equipment, but its ease-of-use reduces our expenditures on staff. As time passes, new needs in our industry will continue to emerge—but we're confident PortaSwitch will handle them, as it always has.”

So it went up until the present day, where VoIP isn't just a pipe dream with spotty quality, but rather a medium that businesses of all sizes, and even ordinary households, turn to on a regular basis. Technological advancements, however, rarely happen in a vacuum, and it's often other technologies that allow some technologies to come about, get properly monetized, or just be able to work to the fullest. The connection between VoxNet and PortaOne, meanwhile, illustrates that point very well. It's not, after all, about just what VoxNet did, but what VoxNet and PortaOne managed to do together. When VoxNet advances, PortaOne will likely be right there with them, and the two working together is doing things that neither may have been able to do alone.