Fonality Gets A New Face
Source: andyabramson.blogs.com
Open source developers have another place to play, with the start of FACE by Fonality.
All posts under tagged ‘Fonality’
New Trixbox Coming From Fonality
Source: andyabramson.blogs.com
I hear that Fonality is doing an overhaul of Trixbox. It’s all geared for solution providers. The news is supposed to be out soon, but with some travel planned I figured I’d point it out now.
Fonality is clearly in a spot where the VoIP world is watching. With offerings also pouring out of company’s like cBeyond, CallTower, onSip from client Junction Networks, M5 and others, businesses now have lots of options that go beyond the Cisco Call Manager and Avaaya PBX’s. With Hosted VoIP gaining ground, and with Asterisk based systems on the rise, Fonality has to make some moves.
It sounds like this is one of them.
Fonality by the Numbers
Source: www.voip-news.com
Fonality is hitting some pretty big numbers.
- 2.6 million: the number of trixbox downloads - trixbox is Fonality’s open source project.
- More than 5,000: the number of customers Fonality has across the globe in more than 100 countries.
- 225 million: the total number of calls over Fonality’s hybrid-hosted systems, PBXtra and trixbox Pro
“We’ve hit the 225 million call threshold and have proven that Fonality can scale with the market opportunity,” said Chris Lyman, Fonality CEO. “We are on track to serve a broad segment of the 35 million small businesses that will adopt VoIP over the next several years.”
Fonality’s PBXtra phone system can support both VoIP calls and traditional telephony. trixbox CE is an open source project that integrates many applications including Asterisk, Linux, MySQL, FreePBX and HUDlite, among others.
The Year Of Asterisk
Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com
Digium, the business founded by Asterisk creator Mark Spencer, is getting ready to release a new version that will support much larger deployments by the end of this year.
Also New Jersey-based service provider, VoicePulse plans a hosted PBX service based on Asterisk according to Network World’s Tim Greene.
The same article also mentions that Digium promises to broaden its influence this year as 3Com makes Asterisk available on a blade for its multifunction branch-office routers. This is in addition to the relabeled commercial Asterisk appliance made by Digium for 3Com small-business customers.
Article also brings out the smaller scale Asterisk based business like Escaux and Fonality, to name a few, sell full-blown custom Asterisk PBXs. Critical Links’ Edgebox surrounds Asterisk with a router, Wi-Fi access point, NAC and other security to fashion a branch-office-in-a-box device.
The article is a must read if you have anything to with VoIP and Asterisk.
Dell Joins Fonality To Conquer SMB VoIP Market
Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com
Dell seeing the value of providing VoIP solutions to it’s vast customer base of small business has chosen to partner with Fonality, a leading SMB VoIP Solution provider.
CEO of Fonality has written a lengthy post to TrixBox weblog and a very good explanation of the facts and needs for the business venture. It explains the view from Fonality’s perspective.
From Dell’s stand point, it is going to the market well prepared with Fonality and Nortel, with Fonality filling up the group 5-125 user business while Nortel will fill the needs of 5-500 user business’.
I think this is a very good news for Fonality and it should clean up things like back doors that everyone jumped up about, including me, and resort to open operations. If you need feedback from your clients, request it. (They did clean up the last act.) TrixBox can go a long way.
For now, all I can say is, Congratulations!
Dell Thinks Small Biz is Big Biz for VoIP
Source: gigaom.com
Dell begins bundling Fonality’s open-source software with its enterprise servers today, its latest gambit to compete in the already-crowded VoIP market — this time targeting companies with 125 employees or fewer.
This is fertile ground: Analyst Alan Weckel of research firm Dell ‘Oro Group estimates annual PBX revenues, including those from VoIP phone systems, will exceed $7.5 billion by 2011. Much of this growth could come from small- to medium-sized businesses. Weckel told The Wall Street Journal in August that he thinks 35 million small businesses will adopt IP phone service before 2010 (about 11 million currently use it), a number that’s likely to ramp up if the economic situation worsens.
Granted, this is a market that has never fulfilled its promise. Few of the many hosted-PBX service providers are even making money. Yet Dell (DELL) still sees opportunity in hawking VoIP to businesses. Why? They buy more gear than cost-conscious housewives. If there is one thing Dell knows, it is that empires can be built on the incremental profits inside lots of gray boxes and the software that runs on them.
Dell is a relatively late entrant here. Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent, to name a few, are established players in the VoIP space, though their products also target larger customers. In the small business space, Digium and Microsoft, which released its Microsoft Office Communication Server in 2007, will be the chief competitors. (Microsoft has claimed a working relationship with Dell in the past.)
Late or not, Dell lives to put the squeeze on the margins of its peers. The Fonality VoIP Phone System will be priced at about $750 per employee for a five-employee system, or $9,999 for a system that will serve 25. This is far less than Cisco-class proprietary system, which can cost as much as $2,000 per employee. Being open source, Dell-Fonality boxes are simpler than most too, and capable of self-installation — an additional savings worth thousands of dollars.
“The big five phone systems-vendors are going to wake up today and see Dell as a competitor and it’s going to be a watershed event — the end of the phone system-oligolopy,” Fonality founder Chris Lyman said.
It certainly is a watershed event for four-year-old Fonality (as Lyman tells Found|READ), which has been selling its own branded VoIP boxes since 2003. Fonality now has 5,000 business customers (and 130 employees). It could sure use Dell’s sales channel to scale. Dell has between 6 million and 7 million small business customers, according to IDC.
Fonality will get a standard revenue share: hardware proceeds go to Dell, software revenues flow to Fonality (Dell won’t disclose the exact breakdown). Users will get their bill from Dell. Tech support will be handled by Fonality for at least the first year, Lyman says. Dell’s service is available for purchase today, via phone. Customers can order systems at Dell.com by February.
Is That Voice in Your App?
Source: gigaom.com
Things have been tough as of late for plain vanilla VoIP service providers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that voice over IP is over as a technology. As my good friend Andy Abramson points out, the focus in the future is going to be on adding voice to apps.
This was one of the trends I talked about when the now-defunct Business 2.0 launched its Next Net series in 2006. The idea behind the series was that as broadband became all-pervasive, everything from the web to mobile to video to voice became part of the next evolution of the Internet. (It has been a guiding principle of my coverage here on GigaOM.)
Fonality was one of the companies we picked for the list, because even at the time, Chris Lyman, Fonality’s CEO, was talking about adding voice to apps. He made a key move today, acquiring Insightful, one of SugarCRM’s largest resellers. The new offering from Fonality, called FonalityCRM, integrates the CRM suite with PBX and offers click-to-call dialing, agent screen pops and several other features.
Others are also experimenting with similar VoIP-app mashups. Iperia, for example, is building an app for real estate agents. Ike Elliott , formerly of Level 3 (LVLT) points out that voice-data-applications have been around for a while, especially in call center applications.
However, as open-source telephony tools (such as Asterisk) become even more sophisticated, and the web 2.0 community finally comes to grips with the importance of voice, we are going to see some clever mashups come to the forefront. Companies like Lypp are making it relatively easy to add voice to web apps through their APIs.
The Lypp API enables rapid VoIP feature implementation, including: click-to-call and click-to-conference; virtual phone booth calling features; and the integration of basic and advanced telephony, such as embedded email and profile call links for Facebook, MySpace and other web-based applications and services.
Have you seen a VoIP-Web 2.0 mashup you like? Drop us a note, or leave a comment.
Fonality Gets Veritical
Source: andyabramson.blogs.com
Fonality, which was missing from VON last week despite Chris Lyman’s boasting to me at Internet Telephony how they would be back in force with their squad at the Boston event, made an acquisition that makes them even more vertical.
This is a logical move given the number of call centers now deploying Fonality.
Fonality Expands in Europe With New Resselers.
Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com
Startup Beat reports that "Fonality Adds Reseller Partners in France, Italy, Poland and the UK", expannding Fonality’s reach in Europe. In Addition to ressellers, Fonality will also add Training and Certification workshops starting with certification training workshop in London.
Fonality uses a hybrid-hosted technology based on the open-source Asterisk telephony software.Trixbox is an open-platform phone system targeted at resellers and advanced users.
Read more at Startup Beat.
TrixBox Pro, Breaking Records and Setting a New Phase
Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com
Today I heard some good news that made me smile. Fonality has proved, once again that OSS Software is viable and people with capability could really make profit and achieve success with Open Source Software.
Not so long ago, TrixBox was a one man SourceForege based project (Under the name Asterisk@home), a good one at that. Over the time the project matured enough to be acquired by Fonality.
After the acquisition, Fonality did a good job of bringing the TrixBox in to the SMB market. First it released the Trixbox 2.0 and subsequently Fonality also released the TrisBox Pro in August 2007.
Now Fonality has announced discounts up to 50% and the fact that 10,000 downloads of the product. To support larger resellers and deployments, Fonality has introduced a revised pricing structure that makes trixbox Pro a compelling alternative for companies with up to 500 seats. These changes can reduce prices up to 50 percent for very large capacity deployments. A new release of trixbox Pro, available now, also supports larger deployments with unlimited mailboxes for voicemail-only extensions, and unlimited use of the Agents on Cell Phones feature which provides enhanced mobility by allowing agents to log into queues remotely.
Fonality has also announced a new reseller tier into the trixbox Reseller Program that allows smaller resellers to qualify for discounts on Fonality products and services by becoming FtOCC (pronounced “F-talk”) certified. The certifications, FtOCC Administrator, FtOCC Technician and FtOCC Engineer are each customized for a different level of technical expertise and depth of experience with trixbox.No quotas are required and certification training includes a free demo kit with two trixbox Pro Call Center Edition lifetime licenses, and one free month of support with certified hardware. Certification and a low initial investment give resellers the accreditation, discounts, and tools to resell and support trixbox Pro without a sales commitment. For more information on registration for FtOCC go to; http://www.trixbox.com/support-and-training/training.
Fonality, www.fonality.com,
Fonality’s trixbox, www.trixbox.org, is home to trixbox CE, trixbox Pro.
Published on October 21st, 2007
under Asterisk, Asterisk@home, Fonality, FtOCC Administrator, FtOCC Engineer, FtOCC Technician, trixbox, trixbox Pro
Fonality brings free VoIP services for business enterprises
Source: voipcentral.org
Fonality has introduced a free phone system, tribox Pro for the business enterprises. It is a downloadable software enabling small and medium business enterprises to make free VoIP calls.
The tribox Pro possesses traditional phone dialing and PBX system features. It provides a host of services to business enterprises including conferencing calling, unified messaging between voicemail and email, employee presence management.
The tribox Pro customers can also enjoy trixNet service. The trixNet is a free in-network calling service that enables trixbox Pro user to call their fellow tribox Pro friends using their regular phone numbers. Fonality plans to provide its free trixNet calling services to Google Talk users next year.
The trixbox is a business class IP PBX system based on Digum’s Asterisk Open Source PBX. open source PBX application platform system. It is available as free downloadable software. It can be installed on a local computer and local IP phones.
Fonality PBXtra, averages 1.5 million calls a week and peeks at 50 million calls
Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com
Another press release by Fonality states that it’s PBXtra customers have placed more than 50 million calls and are now averaging more than 1.5 million calls per week across its award-winning IP-PBX platform. This rapid ramp in call volume further demonstrates Fonality’s success in the middle market and customer demand for high quality, value priced, reliable and fully supported IP telephony solutions.
So where are the Trixbox call volume info? well I guess it is forth coming. The success in PBXtra could translate in two ways for TrixBox. It might get the Chance to ride the wave and become a successful OSS IPPBX for brave SMB’s or it might get left behind if Trixbox cannot keep up or if Fonality loses interest.
So where did I hear about that Trixbox fork? No there is no such thing yet, but if need to be, OpenPBX will be a good contender, when they get all the kinks straightened out.
Meanwhile, PBXtra is available direct from Fonality or through a Fonality reseller. For more information about PBXtra or becoming a Fonality reseller, visit fonality, link is below.
Links;
Fonality
VOIP IP Telephony: OpenPBX RC2 is ready for testing.
Trixbox
