OneCentral Chooses OnApp Portal for Great User Experience

OnApp recently announced that oneCentral had selected its VMWare vCloud portal to help the telecom partners it works with manage Callocate, a oneCentral communications platform. By using the portal, these partners can deliver service more easily and provide better billing and user management.

London-based OnApp Limited offers cloud communications solutions to enterprises, telecoms, hosts, and resellers. Its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform allows businesses to offer public, private, and hybrid clouds; content delivery networking (CDN); disaster recovery; storage and backup; and SaaS applications.

Based in Haarlem in the Netherlands, oneCentral BV is a VoIP provider that developed the Callocate platform. Callocate runs on VMWare, and is a routing and hosting environment that providers use to manage their services.

On August 31, OnApp had released an update to its VMWare vCloud portal, version 4.1, which was touted as a ‘single pane of glass’ control panel that simplifies support, monitoring, and billing.

Since then, the news has been good for OnApp as it has acquired other major customers. StratoGen, an international service provider in the U.K. chose the OnApp portal because of its ability to improve user experience. Los Angeles-based Gawk, Inc. recently joined the OnApp Federation, giving it a more global presence, while reducing its costs.

Since two out of the three latest announcements have to do with OnApp’s portal, which is essentially a dashboard for cloud communications providers, it’s instructional to look at why these UIs are so popular.

One of the major forces pushing dashboards is the business intelligence and analytics industry. By definition, this sector requires informative displays that provide only relevant information all in one place.

Another source confirms this. Layouts should be clean in appearance, but not so ‘busy’ that you cannot find important information. Icons and menus that help navigation and columnar layouts are also good practices.

A glance at some screen shots shows that OnApp is adopting these principals in its UIs. A global map on one screen is another nice touch for displaying information by location. There is no better confirmation of good UIs than the marketplace as both oneCentral and StratoGen specifically went with OnApp because of its portal and improved UX it offers. It’s very likely that other companies 


Edited by Maurice Nagle