It all started more than 10 years ago. In 2006, VoipNow Platform had just landed on the Unified Communications market. Dutch cloud communication service provider Belcentrale was a new telephony operator from Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

What seemed to be a simple crush grew into a long-term relationship built on respect, professionalism, and mutual trust. This article describes how this partnership unfolded across a decade, in the hope that you will put these insights to good use in your business.

VoipNow has always been a catch

In 2006, VoipNow was the first VoIP control panel for Hosting and Internet Service Providers. It was powered with a multi-tenant design, an installation process under 30 minutes, a real-time call charging engine, and cutting edge telephony features. Unsurprisingly, VoipNow gathered a lot of suitors quite fast.

It was only natural, since the platform was specifically tailored for service providers and enabled them to offer reliable and affordable VoIP services to customers. In short, it was a state-of-the-art substitute for traditional PBX boxes. Just like today, for many service providers back then, VoipNow became a vector towards new markets, helping them expand their business and grow profits.

Protagonist, a web hoster founded in 1999, had already been using 4PSA’s solutions for several years. Seeing an opportunity for new business in hosted telephony, they established Belcentrale for this exact purpose. Thus, only days after our platform’s launch, in June 2006, Belcentrale became the third VoipNow customer and the first Dutch telephony operator to offer VoIP solutions to SMBs.

Initially, Belcentrale had three VoipNow servers. However, in less than a year, they were running their business on a VoipNow setup of 6 servers: 3 worker servers running Asterisk, and 3 gateway servers running Kamailio. Due to our 4Grid setup, service providers used VoipNow to deliver enterprise telephony, SIP trunking, wholesale and media gateway services. The 4Grid infrastructure could sustain up to 250 concurrent calls, a competitive advantage for emerging service provider Belcentrale.

Standing the test of time

Throughout the years, Belcentrale experienced with many versions of VoipNow, which gradually evolved from a software IP PBX into the cloud communications platform that it is today.

Currently, Belcentrale has over 30 VoipNow infrastructures and one gateway set up in a distributed architecture based on multiple hardware nodes running the latest VoipNow version. Customers connect to the VoipNow PBX servers that send all calls through the gateway. Each end-user has an extension on the gateway, where the provider manages their call spending. Belcentrale has also used VoipNow’s API to build their own interface, where all the services can be managed and bought.

Over the years, VoipNow platform became the engine behind all Belcentrale products, helping the provider extend their portfolio and better serve customers. Today, the company also operates on the mobile network as a truly integrated communications provider. It offers a wide rage of cloud solutions including advanced business telephony, mobility, broadband, online collaboration software, CRM software, online backup, and hardware.

We’re in this together

With an impressive customer base of 30,000 SMBs from various verticals, Belcentrale does not focus on a specific industry. In fact, they deliver communication services to a large variety of companies from bakeries, travel agencies, and call centers to bigger players like Jet Airways and Malaysian Airlines, SoftLayer and Concave.

The key point of their business strategy is to keep it simple for customers. Hence, not only do they offer them a complete solution, but they also provide free training to help them make the most of their services.

The Belcentrale Team

Multitenancy

Belcentrale has a large customer base. Without VoipNow’s multitenancy, they would have had a hard time managing it. VoipNow’s role-based, multi-tenant design allows the provider to easily access and control each level of management, distributing resources to customers based on configurable permissions and limits.

Pay-as-you-go licensing

Belcentrale sees the pay-as-you-go licensing as a huge advantage, unprecedented by any otherwise affordable platforms. Being allowed to start with very little to almost no investment, SMBs can grow at their own pace, and enjoy advanced business telephony services from day one.

Real-time call charging

VoipNow’s built-in call charging engine enables Belcentrale to deliver customized services that are compatible with local market requirements. At the same time, the platform’s intelligent call routing minimizes costs and helps customers save big on telephony bills, which is a major selling point.

Call center tools

Belcentrale’s customers can easily handle heavy incoming traffic thanks to VoipNow’s call center tools including IVRs, queues, remote and local agents. The extension virtualization feature successfully meets the need for hot desking. Especially for call centers that struggle with targets and overhead costs. Also, the platform’s real-time reports on call flows and statistics help them improve operations and agents’ performance.

Cost-saving APIs

Belcentrale uses SystemAPI, a SOAP web service available in VoipNow, to create all customer accounts on the PBX servers and the gateway. The API can also be used for mapping all phone numbers from the gateway to the appropriate PBX. Currently, Belcentrale focuses on integration with their customers’ CRMs. However, they also implement dashboards streaming data from queues, agents, and other stats. The ultimate purpose of this integration is to help call center managers assess performance and increase productivity.

Reliable, savvy support

When the communication of 30,000 companies depend on your hosted PBX offering, having instant access to technical support becomes crucial. Belcentrale prides on the great support of 4PSA’s Professional Services team, who offer continuous assistance with setup and configuration.

10 years of mutual commitment

VoipNow platform has made a lot of progress for the past 10+ years, gaining international recognition and building a reputation for innovation in the UC industry. All this time, Belcentrale has been a true partner, witnessing every step of its evolution and showing support along its release cycle. Here they are last year, celebrating VoipNow’s 10th anniversary with us!

Collaboration is the next step

We stay committed to constantly improving VoipNow platform, and thus helping service providers extend their portfolio with instant collaboration services for SMBs and enterprises.

Hubgets, our latest solution for business communication and collaboration, enables providers to gain new customers and win against OTTs (over-the-top providers) with:

• Centralized communication and instant access to shared resources
• Chat, voice, video, file transfer and screen sharing in one interface
• Real-time, AI-based happiness index for more productive teams
• Fewer interruptions, less noise, better focus on work
• Faster onboarding and increased team engagement
• Page, the online business card with chat, voice and video

Just like in any kind of partnership, the only way to grow is through mutual trust and genuine care.

What we appreciate the most about 4PSA is the great support and high tech standard of everybody working there!

Karim Bourjila, Belcentrale Sales Team

Our strong commitment to partners shows in the continuous efforts we invest into perfecting our products so that they create new growth opportunities and increase customer satisfaction. Thank you for choosing our solutions.