We all now love a softphone, right?
That super-mobile, internet-enabled interaction with all of our contacts is transforming how we communicate.
Whether through mobile app or computer desktop, the seamless ability to connect via voice, video or message means organisation’s desk phones are superfluous and their employees’ physical locations are irrelevant.
Productivity increases because their teams are ‘in’ when they’re ‘out’, and costs are reduced because they are no longer devouring expensive network minutes.
But, despite the game-changing functionality, many organisations have not yet made the switch.
And – although that spells large-scale opportunity for Managed Service Providers everywhere – the rapidly expanding softphone market is providing a level of choice that doesn’t always make things easy.
“Softphone technology is changing everything for the better, but end-user organisations and Managed Service Providers alike understandably look for a differentiator when considering their options,” says Enzo Viscito, Managing Director of the UCaaS division of leading global communications infrastructure vendor PortaOne.
“We believe we provide those differentiators.”
On the evidence of PortaOne’s past innovations, that would seem very much to be the case.
Many traditional softphone vendors developed their apps some years ago – and, as they were mobile-native applications, they needed to implement low-level VoIP protocols such as SIP or RTP in those apps.
Together with the need for testing on a variety of new phone devices and network conditions, this made development and maintenance more difficult every day.
In 2019, PortaOne put their bet on a combination of WebRTC and Flutter technologies for creating softphones.
WebRTC is a global, developer-driven open-source project that enables real-time media communications like voice, video and data transfer to occur natively between browsers and devices without the need for complex plug-ins or additional hardware. And Flutter is a new framework for developing cross-platform apps by Google. It uses a brand-new programming language called Dart and allows the developer to write a single version of a code that later can be turned into pixel-perfect native apps for Android or iOS. Currently, most softphone development projects end up needing to run two separate versions of code, maintained by two different teams.
“Back then, a start-up WebTrit was participating in the PortaOne accelerator program,” explains Andriy Zhylenko, CEO of PortaOne.
“The product they envisioned bringing to market was an online practice platform for business negotiations, which needed a monetization function, a reliable platform for subscriber management, robust infrastructure to handle video calls and flexible tools for building branded customer-facing apps. Soon after the work started, the project was paused because some people were sceptical about whether you could acquire real business negotiation skills through video conferencing”
So, says Zhylenko, the WebTrit team pivoted and started developing the technology on Flutter and WebRTC in order to be able to offer it as an SDK (software development kit) for creating communication apps for other companies, including telco operators using the PortaOne platform.
“COVID-19 happened and now nobody is sceptical,” he says. “Today, it is proven to have been ahead of its time.”
Now, this technology and SDK is at the heart of PortaOne’s latest solution: PortaPhone, a super-simple way to access and leverage cloud-based communications platforms.
PortaPhone can be delivered as a native app for Android or iOS, branded according to a CSP’s wishes. It also can run in a website mode, accessible with a single click in all the major web browsers.
It can be configured to ring simultaneously on both a regular desk phone and in the app or browser.
And it also supports voice and video calls, call recording, call history and other standard hosted PBX functionalities, such as call hold or transfer.
Because PortaPhone uses WebRTC, it works reliably for users connected to any network or behind any router or firewall. And since it uses modern codecs such as Opus, it provides better sound quality than traditional VoIP calls.
