Internet telephony service providers do not always have the capital to purchase proprietary private branch exchange licenses or the infrastructure to build one for themselves. In response to ITSP startups that wish to hit the ground running, Velocity has released its cloud-based hosted switch rental program.

The company's announcement says the program is driven by a combination of Porta One's Procinctus platform and Velocity's proprietary VoIP portal. In tandem, those solutions provide startups with a platform with which they can begin their own VoIP businesses as well as the ability to track their own billing and manage session initiation protocols and unified messaging capabilities. It is essentially everything an ITSP needs in one location.

"The more modest needs and budgets of smaller start ups make purchasing a proprietary license a less optimal choice,” said Jason Silverman, Velocity's Director of Sales. “Now companies can rent Velocity VoIP's cloud-based hosted switch instead of needing to purchase the entire switch. With Velocity VoIP's cloud-based hosted soft switch, resellers are now able to start their own VoIP company without having to make large out of pocket investments or commitments."

The package contains two important elements that make it attractive to startups. First, it gathers all the billing and protocol capabilities into a central, cloud-based portal and it allows startups to rent, rather than purchase, the portal. Among the collection of features available in the switch rental program are call forwarding and transfer, group pickup, NAT transversal, Web and phone voicemail, teleconferencing support, and call recording.

ITSP startups can offer these, among many other features, immediately to their clients and take advantage of unlimited usage of these services from Velocity. Furthermore, the cloud-based nature of the service contains redundancy, so startups will not have to worry about downtime affecting their own clients.

Startups want to provide their customers with products that are reliable and full-featured, and with Velocity, they can offer the reliability of the cloud as well as every telecommunications feature PortaSwitch makes available.