Bulgarian Service Provider Gains Significant Market Share with Sangoma's Gateway Solution

To maintain a dominant market position, today's service providers need to develop strategies to deploy cost-effective, easy-to-manage services to a wider audience. Take Orbitel, Bulgaria's first service provider since the fall of the national PTT monopoly.

Operating since 2003, Orbitel has found success delivering managed IP services to large corporate enterprises, achieving annual growth rates of around 25 percent. However, to grow its business further, Orbitel knew that it needed to offer prospective customers next-generation voice services.

The company went to market looking for a solution that could provide interoperability with its next-generation IP network and with legacy PBX (News - Alert) infrastructure that many clients still maintained. This way, Orbitel could continue to provide its customers with the look and feel of traditional fixed-line services while also enabling value-add functionality like number portability and even bundled IP and voice.

In order to accomplish this goal, Orbitel went to market looking for a gateway solution, and eventually pared the 20 possible vendors down to two, one of which was Sangoma – the company it eventually selected. Orbitel then created a test network to find the winning solution.

"The whole process represented a six-month investment," Stefan Stefanov, Orbitel's Chief Technology Officer, noted in a case study. "The features within the gateway itself were also central to supporting our services, enabling flexible dial-plan management, on-gateway flexible routing and number translation from PBX to IP network."

Orbitel eventually partnered with Sangoma after finding its VoIP gateways offered a more competitive price and performance, as well as a wider feature set and support for all PBX types and ISDN interfaces.

The company deployed the gateways nationally in March 2005 and never looked back.

"Implementation was straight forward in terms of ease of configuration, and Sangoma’s Vega gateways have performed absolutely to expectation," Stefanov added. "Sangoma’s core product-development team provided support and we were able to contact them around-the-clock. We are delighted with the help they have provided."

With the Sangoma Vega gateways deployed, Orbitel was able to connect existing TDM customers to its IP backbone network and deliver next-gen services that they otherwise couldn't. In addition, the service provider achieved on-gateway flexible routing and number manipulation from PBX to IP network.

The end result was astonishing. Between new and existing customers, more than 250 enterprises signed up for the service within the first two months of operation. Orbitel has continued to gain market share ever since.

Beecher Tuttle is a TMCnet contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Rich Steeves