LignUp Corporation, a leading provider of converged communications solutions, announced the general availability of the FastLign managed services offerings for hosted telephony service providers. FastLign is an industry alliance founded by LignUp, NexTone and other industry leaders, to accelerate the adoption of IP telephony services by allowing service providers to rapidly and cost-effectively deliver competitive services to the marketplace.
FastLign combines a number of key elements to form a fully managed wholesale telephony service:
-- The network backbone of TeliaSonera International Carrier (TSIC)
-- A fully integrated telephony services architecture powered by the LignUp Communications Platform
-- Turnkey LignUp and third-party hosted applications built with LignUp's Web services development capabilities
-- The operations and datacenter capabilities of the United Kingdom's Streamdoor Limited.
Together, these elements enable emerging service providers to move past service deployment challenges to focus on their core competencies, customer service requirements and new revenue opportunities.
"In the past, IP telephony services have been prohibitively time consuming and expensive to build, deploy and manage," said Johan Andersson, VP and head of Marketing, Strategy and New Business at TeliaSonera International Carrier. "Service providers must build these services from the ground up, integrating a wide variety of technologies and services to provide a complete services solution. FastLign provides service providers with a hosted telephony services model that removes system integration cycles, provides operations support and allows customers to address the needs of the marketplace."
Cost-Effective, Managed Services
Streamdoor, a provider of hosted on-demand contact center applications and VoIP communication services, provide FastLign's operational backbone and datacenter capacity, managed telephony services support and maintenance and the critical function of providing mediated access to the TeliaSonera International Carrier (TSIC) network. FastLign service providers need not develop organizational competencies in the construction and operation of hosted services. Streamdoor and TSIC make it possible for FastLign customers to access infrastructure, technical expertise and word-class network capabilities that smaller service providers would ordinarily rarely be able to afford.
Reduced Time to Market, Integration Costs
FastLign's reference architecture provides essential components for delivering hosted telephony services. Leading industry solutions such as NexTone Communications' Multi-protocol Session Controller (MSC) are fully integrated and proven interoperable with the LignUp Communications Platform and other FastLign partner solutions. FastLign service providers thereby bypass component evaluation, integration and testing stages of implementation, essentially reducing the time to market for these services.
"Experience teaches us that hosted telephony providers face a number of significant barriers to market entry," said Jon Keattch, founder and CEO at Streamdoor. "FastLign removes many of the burdens of building and managing these services, while also providing the turnkey applications and development capabilities necessary to speed services to market and compete through innovation and differentiation. We are pleased to join TeliaSonera and LignUp to bring FastLign to Europe."
Innovate to Differentiate
FastLign's licensing model brings the best benefits of ownership to a managed services model, allowing providers to fully modify and customize their services to address the specific needs of their customers. FastLign providers can speed their telephony services offerings to market by easily modifying and deploying a variety of turnkey applications from LignUp and other FastLign partners. The LignUp Communications Platform provides flexible development capabilities for service providers customizing hosted applications. As services, these hosted applications allow these businesses to stay ahead of services commoditization, ensuring long-term delivery of competitive, high-margin solutions.
"Hosted VoIP service providers must have solutions to the challenges of infrastructure investments, related integration and interoperability struggles, and hosted application development costs," said Richard Kirk, vice president of LignUp EMEA. "Furthermore, once services are up and running, providers need flexible platforms for developing services that differentiate them in the marketplace. We are proud to work within this field of industry leaders to help next generation service providers speed their offerings to market, and extend the adoption of LignUp's flexible platform for easy development, enhancement, and differentiation of VoIP services."
TeliaSonera International Carrier offers the FastLign services to its global customer base, including its Internet service provider customers.
For more information on FastLign, please visit
www.FastLign.org.