Talk, don’t travel with audio conferencing
By Leslie Faughnan
Although phone audio conferencing has been around for many years, it has been relatively cumbersome to use, requiring for the most part dialin to a service provider. Yet audio conferencing is very much on the rise, both as a means of saving travel costs and time and, more recently, as a reducer of carbon footprint.
That is the market opportunity taken by Aonta, a specialist developer of software-based audio conferencing solutions based in Nova UCD. Founded in 2005 by two experienced network engineers – David Seavers and Derek Moore, who had held senior positions with Spectel and Avaya – Aonta offers carrier-grade Audio conferencing based on VoIP and SIP.
“Our solution can scale up to carrier level or down to small enterprise,” said Seavers. “It is entirely server-based software that works with an IP PBX.
“Our principal market so far is in financial services, including the very specialised requirements of trading floors. These have only recently begun to move to VoIP and SIP but the digital nature of the traffic offers them valuable new functionality.
“That would include, for example, recording and other security features.”
Another market segment is conferencing service providers, giving them added functionality to offer their customers, plus overcoming some key technical issues with previous technology.
The value of a software solution is aptly illustrated, Seavers said, by the fact that Aonta recently set up a system for an Australian conferencing service provider.
“This is a big player with turnover of the order ofAus$400million.Yet none of us has ever been to Australia. We set the whole thing up remotely,” he said.
The key value to the Aonta solution is in providing high-quality audio conferencing on demand with just a few clicks.
“Typically, our users would have up to about seven users on a conference call at any one time. They can easily set up their own rules, for example, for regular scheduled conferences or for urgent crisis meetings which would involve hunting down the required participants using voicemail and e-mail.”
Aonta offers a variety of options including ‘try before you buy’ and a rental scheme that Seavers said would cost about €12 per port per month. Provided the business has the bandwidth, the number of concurrent ports can be readily increased on demand.
