GOC

Fonality (News - Alert) is one of those remarkable companies that manages to stay under everyone’s personal radar. They specialize in making amazingly inexpensive yet profoundly useful phone systems for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) such as its renowned PBXtra IP-PBX.

 

Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality (www.fonality.com), says “Fonality is a ‘two-headed’ entity. Our legacy business line is based on what we think is the first commercial Asterisk PBX (News - Alert). I don’t mean some big open source thing that you have to download and install. I mean a true mirror of a big iron machine. We ship the software, phones and server to you and can plug it all into your router and bang, you have a phone system. We started shipping this kind of package in 2004. That product has been called PBXtra. We’ve shipped many of those to this day. There are about 2,500 of them out there in the field, in 50 countries. The server comes in either a tower or a rackmount, depending on how much money you want to spend on your hardware.”

 

“As you might expect, our PBXtra package starts at a very affordable level,” says Lyman. “You get our server, software with unlimited licenses for under $1,000. We sell head-to-head against Cisco, ShoreTel (News - Alert) and Avaya. This thing literally comes in a box from UPS. You open it up, you plug it into your router, it’s already working. You plug your phones in and they’re already configured. You don’t have to deal with firmware. It sells just like a PBX.”

 

“Asterisk (News - Alert) consists of 200,000 lines of code,” says Lyman. “We wrote 1.3 million lines of code. It wasn’t an overnight coding job, if you know what I mean. Just to put it in perspective of just how ‘thin’ Asterisk is compared to the code we had to write, we were 25 engineers and four years into writing application code, and we probably had twice as many people working on our product as were working on Asterisk itself. People who understand software know that it’s exponentially hard to make things simple in software. Asterisk is written in C, and a lot of our code is written in web code, so that’s actually written in PERL and HTML. We also have a really cool presence management application that called HUD [Heads Up Display] written in Java. It runs on Windows XP, Vista and Macintosh. We chose Java because we wanted the application to run on the Mac, which is sort of an emerging market in the tech space. We thought about writing it in Microsoft’s C#, but at the time it wasn’t yet quite mature enough.”

 

“So this is what the ‘first head’ of Fonality has been selling,” says Layman. “Our second ‘head’ sprouted when we realized that we were really moving a lot of product and were enjoying great revenue growth. But nobody really knew about us in this Asterisk space, even though we have more deployments than anyone. So we decided we had to get into the free open source space. We then acquired the Asterisk@Home project, which was the biggest open source project in the world at the time. Basically, this community had taken Asterisk and made it easier to use and did some of the things we did in an open source way, wrapping applications around it. So, we acquired that project and renamed it trixbox.”

 

“Trixbox has gotten massive,” beams Lyman. “We see three times as many daily downloads of this thing than Asterisk combined. I know it’s three times as many as Asterisk because on their site and in a recent magazine article they said they were getting 1,000 downloads a day, and we handle 3,000 downloads a day of trixbox.”

 

“So Fonality has essentially embarked on becoming a big part of the Asterisk movement,” says Lyman. “We took our HUD application and we made a free version of it called HUDlite. We soon were experiencing 200,000 downloads of it. So, people are running HUDlite for free. It looks like a softphone but it isn’t, though it does interface with any SIP-compliant hard or softphone. It’s phone agnostic. We figured that there are enough phone providers out there, so why should be one? Also, HUDlite is actually more of a call control and presence management application; it keeps track of everybody in your corporation so you can chat, email or phone them. It’s has a client-server architecture: There’s a proxy that runs on the server that keeps track of all of the clients. So if you or I are in a company we’ll each have the client installed on our Windows box, but then that application is talking to the server. HUD can scale up to about a 500-person office.”

 

Fonality has also developed for resellers and IT professionals trixbox Pro, a “hybrid-hosted” phone system, wherein the IP-PBX and application software downloads to a customer site and installs on a central PC. It then connects to the Fonality network where system health, availability, call quality and usage are continually monitored. Thus, trixbox Pro is essentially a free hosting service. It allows users to take their work phone number with them and use a mobile device as a primary phone, or have calls ring through to a PC at home or any other remote location. The entire trixbox Pro system can be branded with any look, feel, logo, etc. and in seven different localized versions, including US English, UK English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

 

Incidentally, Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) announced a new trixbox Open Communication Certification (FtOCC) course to the program at the upcoming INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO West 2007 (www.itexpo.com) on September 10-12, 2007 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Titled “FtOCC Technician”, the course provides telephony resellers and IT professionals with in-depth technical training on Fonality PBXtra, as well as trixbox CE and the newly introduced trixbox Pro. FtOCC Technician, and the previously scheduled “FtOCC Administrator”, are being presented in collaboration with Fonality. Registration is currently open at www.itexpo.com.”

 

 

 

What’s the best resource to learn about latest trends in the IP communications industry? Why, INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO, of course. ITEXPO West 2007 is just around the corner—this year it’s being held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in California, Sept. 10-12. Register here. Preview sessions, speakers and exhibitors. And don’t forget to check out the brand new Green Technology World Conference.