4PSA VoipNow

4PSA VoipNow is a Linux IP PBX software built on multi-tenant software architecture and based on Open Source technologies. Rack-Soft, the software developer says that the product is designed to provide hosted VoIP services to enterprise and residential markets. It can be used by ITSP’s (Internet Telephony Service Provider), ISP, HSP, ASP or by companies on their internal infrastructure. The software comes in two editions:

*4PSA VoipNow Express: free edition for enthusiasts, residential and small organizations, scales up to ten extensions.
*4PSA VoipNow Professional: commercial version for service providers and enterprises

Product architecture

4PSA VoipNow provides hosted IP PBX services, the customer being able to manage the system in multi role, web based interface. The system uses the Open Source Asterisk PBX software to deliver the telephony services. Rack-Soft customized Asterisk in order to accomplish user separation and quality of service. The database backend is provided by MySQL, the most popular Open Source relational database engine. The database schema is fully relation and utilizes the latest MySQL features, like procedures, functions, triggers, views. The control interface is programmed in PHP 5.2, which runs on an Apache 2.2 server, delivering a DHTML, AJAX enabled user interface.
The interaction between the web interface and the PBX functions is accomplished using a security separation layer.

4PSA VoipNow supports High Availability and it’s designed to work in cluster, with multi-level access control policies, and web based user interface. Asterisk IP telephony engine features are expanded with multi level operations and reselling centric features oriented for hosted PBX environments. Also, in addition, 4PSA VoipNow introduces high availability capabilities, downstream billing operations and separated permissions and limits for each phone extension.

Features
4PSA VoipNow provides PBX features like: call management, call routing, voicemail, conferencing, automatic call distribution (call queues), auto attendant menus (IVR), fax integration, callback, calling cards, etc.

The system introduces four access control levels for VoIP PBX hosting services:
*Administrator - the owner of the system, with full control over the system
*Reseller - the reseller of the VoIP services
*Client - the reseller's customer, typically a company that implements VoIP
*Extension - the end user of the system, usually the employee who uses the company’s phone terminal.

Due to the four levels of management, it is technically possible for the reseller to also resell services further, without having to invest in a 4PSA VoipNow server.

The vendor provides virtualization templates for system installation on Virtuozzo / OpenVZ, making the system installation and management much easier on these platforms. The voice quality is not affected by virtualization when the correct limits are imposed on the virtual machines.

The PBX can be connected to a VoIP provider using a SIP channel connection or using the PSTN network (via E1, T1 or analog regular phone lines) using a PCI compatible card. Multiple SIP providers are supported for redundancy. The system chooses the best cost of the call and provides resilience when a connection to the provider goes down, by choosing another path. 4PSA VoipNow real-time routing technology is based on a network demon that performs call cost computations which is able to find the best cost in the database in several milliseconds even when the database contains millions of area code records. In fact this time is the time required in order to traverse in depth a graph.

4PSA VoipNow billing engine supports prepaid and postpaid billing plans. Billing is based on predefined billing plans, resellers and clients being able to create billing plans for their users.

The web interface is template based and customizable at user level (based on Smarty templating engine), and includes language preferences and sound files management. Rack-Soft provides on the website documentation and SDK tools for translators and third-party skin developers, as well documentation and examples for interaction with the system SOAP API in an Open Source example client.

4PSA VoipNow provisioning engine supports the major SIP phone vendors from Cisco, Linksys, Snom, Polycom, Grandstream, etc.

The software is compatible with x86 and PowerPC Linux servers. The supported distribution list is below:
*RedHat Enterprise Linux Server 5 (IBM PowerPC64)
*RedHat Enterprise Linux Server 5 (i386/x86_64)
*RedHat Enterprise Linux (AS/ES) 4 (i386/x86_64)
*RedHat Enterprise Linux (AS/ES) 3 (i386)
*CentOS 5.x (i386/x86_64)
*CentOS 4.x (i386/x86_64)
*CentOS 3.x (i386)
*Fedora Core 5 (i386)
*Fedora Core 4 (i386)
*Suse 10.0 (i386)

4PSA VoipNow is available in RPM format for all operating systems supported.

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