August, 2019 – Sky Networks Receives a TMC Labs Innovation Award

From: TMC Innovation Award Announcement

It has been another amazing year in technology and communications and we are thrilled to report the innovation in the market is not slowing down. Winners of the coveted 2019 INTERNET TELEPHONY TMC Labs Innovation Award include endpoint solutions that leverage DECT (News – Alert) from Grandstream, Comprehensive billing from OneBill, an HTML5 omnichannel solution from Upstream Works Software, great UCaaS innovations from Star2Star, OnSIP, RingCentral (News – Alert), a great broadband solution from HUGHES, and more. We were also impressed with Sky DANCE from SKYWORKS – it offers a flexible and powerful open-source softswitch solution for carriers. We commend these companies for their continued innovation and desire to continually enhance the products they deliver to their clients.

• Class 4 switching of SIP and SS7 traffic with least cost routing, including the ability to process SIP-I/SIP-T traffic. The focus is the wholesale market. It also includes extensive routing, translation and transcoding capabilities.
• Class 5 switching solutions for the residential and hosted PBX markets.
• Softphones for iOS and Android for business or residential applications as well as WebRTC phones. This includes centralized provisioning.
• RTT and WebRTC services.
• Integrated billing package.
• A prebuilt commercial site called Sky-Central that allows new providers to quickly offer competitive hosted PBX solutions by simple rebranding.
• RESTful APIs for provisioning and call control.

The solution can be offered as a hosted solution built for service providers and can be physical hardware-based or virtualized, usually either an Amazon instance or VMWare.

The team behind the company has created multiple solutions that have resulted in merger/acquisitions with companies such as Lucent, VocalTec, Stratus Technologies (News – Alert) and Magic Jack.

Sky DANCE leverages an amazing amount of open-source projects from:

• Freeswitch
• Kamailio
• Redis
• Apache
• Postgres
• MySQL
• ASTPP
• Fusion PBX
• Doubango

These solutions were integrated and modified to meet their strict requirements and then used in combination with proprietary software from Sky Networks to offer a complete class 4/5 solution for the Tier 2/3 market. It is one of the first to offers SIP-I/SIP-T switching on these platforms for carriers that still process SS7 traffic. Sky Networks offers SS7 solutions using gateways from TelcoBridges and Audiocodes and also supports cards from Sangoma. Sky DANCE includes RESTful APIs to allow provisioning and call control of all the solutions. This makes integration into customers’ front- and back-end CRM solutions simple. In addition, the ability to use the APIs of all the associated projects is preserved, which allows easy customization of final solutions.

The solution offers a high level of redundancy and scalability out of the box. It can scale from a single server to a solution that spans many cities with real-time databases maintained (via Redis). on all the servers. For Class 5 switching, the endpoints can be registered on any of the servers and reached by incoming calls from any other server (floating endpoints). All this can be administered as a single “super switch.”

The solution is very flexible and works on Windows, Macs, and Linux machines. As it is open-source-based, it is more cost-effective than much of the competition. In addition, SkyPhone can be adapted after release to the app store using the technologies of ionics/cordova or React Native. This allows things like the login and setup pages to be dynamic, driven by a database so that one phone can be used by resellers and easily rebranded without having to submit a separate release for each reseller. That version of the Sky Phone requires a one-time company/reseller login, which then sets the feature set for the phone, followed by the subscriber login, which sets the subscriber features allowed.

Some of the recent improvements are making the RESTful APIs more comprehensive, allowing service providers to offer solutions that compete with companies like PubNub, Twilio or even the recent offering from SignalWire. Sky Networks continues to expose more features through its Sky Central website and enhancing the feature set offered through WebRTC.

We chose Sky DANCE to win the coveted INTERNET TELEPHONY TMC Labs Innovation Award because of its blend of features, scalability and open-source roots, integrating some of the best and most robust solutions on the market in a cost-effective package.