LignUp FastLign Goes Live in Europe With Managed IP Telephony Services; TeliaSonera International Carrier, LignUp and Streamdoor Launch to Reduce Deployment Time and Implementation Costs for Hosted Telephony Providers



    LignUp Corporation, a leading provider of converged
    communications solutions, today announced the general availability of
    the FastLign managed services offerings for hosted telephony service
    providers. FastLign is an industry alliance founded by LignUp, NexTone
    and other industry leaders, to accelerate the adoption of IP telephony
    services by allowing service providers to rapidly and cost-effectively
    deliver competitive services to the marketplace.
    FastLign combines a number of key elements to form a fully managed
    wholesale telephony service:

    -- The network backbone of TeliaSonera International Carrier
    (TSIC)

    -- A fully integrated telephony services architecture powered by
    the LignUp Communications Platform

    -- Turnkey LignUp and third-party hosted applications built with
    LignUp's Web services development capabilities

    -- The operations and datacenter capabilities of the United
    Kingdom's Streamdoor Limited.

    Together, these elements enable emerging service providers to move
    past service deployment challenges to focus on their core
    competencies, customer service requirements and new revenue
    opportunities.
    "In the past, IP telephony services have been prohibitively time
    consuming and expensive to build, deploy and manage," said Johan
    Andersson, VP and head of Marketing, Strategy and New Business at
    TeliaSonera International Carrier. "Service providers must build these
    services from the ground up, integrating a wide variety of
    technologies and services to provide a complete services solution.
    FastLign provides service providers with a hosted telephony services
    model that removes system integration cycles, provides operations
    support and allows customers to address the needs of the marketplace."

    Cost-Effective, Managed Services

    Streamdoor, a provider of hosted on-demand contact center
    applications and VoIP communication services, provide FastLign's
    operational backbone and datacenter capacity, managed telephony
    services support and maintenance and the critical function of
    providing mediated access to the TeliaSonera International Carrier
    (TSIC) network. FastLign service providers need not develop
    organizational competencies in the construction and operation of
    hosted services. Streamdoor and TSIC make it possible for FastLign
    customers to access infrastructure, technical expertise and word-class
    network capabilities that smaller service providers would ordinarily
    rarely be able to afford.

    Reduced Time to Market, Integration Costs

    FastLign's reference architecture provides essential components
    for delivering hosted telephony services. Leading industry solutions
    such as NexTone Communications' Multi-protocol Session Controller
    (MSC) are fully integrated and proven interoperable with the LignUp
    Communications Platform and other FastLign partner solutions. FastLign
    service providers thereby bypass component evaluation, integration and
    testing stages of implementation, essentially reducing the time to
    market for these services.
    "Experience teaches us that hosted telephony providers face a
    number of significant barriers to market entry," said Jon Keattch,
    founder and CEO at Streamdoor. "FastLign removes many of the burdens
    of building and managing these services, while also providing the
    turnkey applications and development capabilities necessary to speed
    services to market and compete through innovation and differentiation.
    We are pleased to join TeliaSonera and LignUp to bring FastLign to
    Europe."

    Innovate to Differentiate

    FastLign's licensing model brings the best benefits of ownership
    to a managed services model, allowing providers to fully modify and
    customize their services to address the specific needs of their
    customers. FastLign providers can speed their telephony services
    offerings to market by easily modifying and deploying a variety of
    turnkey applications from LignUp and other FastLign partners. The
    LignUp Communications Platform provides flexible development
    capabilities for service providers customizing hosted applications. As
    services, these hosted applications allow these businesses to stay
    ahead of services commoditization, ensuring long-term delivery of
    competitive, high-margin solutions.
    "Hosted VoIP service providers must have solutions to the
    challenges of infrastructure investments, related integration and
    interoperability struggles, and hosted application development costs,"
    said Richard Kirk, vice president of LignUp EMEA. "Furthermore, once
    services are up and running, providers need flexible platforms for
    developing services that differentiate them in the marketplace. We are
    proud to work within this field of industry leaders to help next
    generation service providers speed their offerings to market, and
    extend the adoption of LignUp's flexible platform for easy
    development, enhancement, and differentiation of VoIP services."
    TeliaSonera International Carrier offers the FastLign services to
    its global customer base, including its Internet service provider
    customers.

    For more information on FastLign, please visit www.FastLign.org.

    About LignUp Corporation

    LignUp Corporation delivers a powerful converged IP communications
    platform deployed with hosted telephony, voice mail, unified
    messaging, auto attendant and other Web applications. The 100%
    software, native-SIP platform is powered by LignUp Call Control XML
    (CCTRL) and LignUp Media Control XML (MCTRL) and enables solution
    integrators and service providers to quickly and easily create unique,
    high margin VoIP applications and services. The proven LignUp
    Communications Platform is deployed today in over 150 organizations
    worldwide and is distributed in Japan by SkyWave and SkyWave partners
    Hitachi IT, NEC-SI and Net One Systems. LignUp has been named to the
    Pulver 100 list of leading private VoIP companies, and has been
    recognized for innovation with the TMC Labs Innovation Award and the
    EuroStart Channel Excellence Award. Headquartered in Silicon Valley,
    LignUp has offices in Salt Lake City, London and Tokyo. Visit
    www.LignUp.com for more information.

    About Streamdoor Limited

    Streamdoor provides IP Contact Centre services on-demand for use
    by large organisations, medium sized companies and public
    institutions. Streamdoor's services enable companies to gain
    competitive advantage by aligning investment and expenditure in
    contact centre technology with actual business requirements. The
    services offer multi-channel connections, via any chosen network and
    are available on a flexible on-demand usage basis. The company's data
    centres are based on Cisco Systems' IP Communications solutions
    providing application scalability, resilience and security.
    Streamdoor's services are sold through network operators and value
    added Partners that assist companies in developing solutions and
    services for their customers. The company has offices in London and
    New York. Visit www.streamdoor.com for further information.