NetCentrex Intros Voice-Over-IP Service

NetCentrex on Tuesday launched its first voice-over-IP offering for the U.S. market. The service is aimed at enterprises that want to rapidly ramp up to IP telephony, as well as at telecom carriers and service providers who want to quickly offer IP voice services to customers.

The NetCentrex package consists of three components: the Call Control Server, a programmable switch that manages calls between gateways and IP phones; the IP Voice Response Server, a programmable voice server that can be used to generate IP answering machine scripts, among other functions; and the application server, which is required for programming these systems.

The company says users can buy the system outright to install at their own locations. The Call Control Server and Application Server are priced between $59,000 and $200,000, depending on configuration. The IP Voice Response Server is between $50,000 and $135,000.

Smaller businesses, new telephone companies, and others with limited IT resources will probably prefer to take advantage of its more flexible leasing model, NetCentrex says, because it will help those customers avoid making costly and time-consuming investments in architectures and maintenance, and will quickly get their IP voice initiatives up and running.

The company has built data centers in Santa Clara, Calif., and is offering its VOIP product as an outsourced service; users can access their VOIP applications through a Web interface. Fees will be based on usage; for example, users that generate 1 million minutes of traffic per month would pay about 1.9 cents per minute.

Because the platform uses a Web-enabled architecture and is location-independent, users can easily modify the included applications or create additional ones to plug on top of the NetCentrex platform, and then efficiently deploy these centralized applications to users worldwide, the company says. "This enables us to be a sort of catalyst to allow a faster transition to IP telephony," says Olivier Hersent, founder and chief technical officer of NetCentrex.