Soul seeks resellers for Linksys VoIP platform

Stuart Corner
Friday, 13 July 2007 02:33

Business IT - Technology

Soul (ASX: SPT) is now recruiting reseller partners for the Linksys One small business IP telephony and data network system, more than a year after it first announced plans to do so.

In June 2006 Linksys and Soul announced that they were recruiting and training agents and VARs for Soul's planned roll out its voice and Internet service with the Linksys One system later in 2006.

That announcement came several months after Soul told the ASX that it had would have exclusive access to the Cisco Linksys One hosted IP telephony offering. However, at that time Melbourne-based IP Systems, which had been named by Linksys as one of the first Linksys One partners at the global launch of the system back in November 2005, was also gearing up to offer the Linksys One service and recruiting resellers.

"Linksys and Soul have spent 12 months working together to create this innovative converged voice and data platform for small businesses, a key pillar of the Linksys Connected Office strategy," said Graeme Reardon, regional director, Australia and New Zealand at Linksys.

According to Craig Levy, general manager of product development at Soul, "Soul has created a number of flexible packages, allowing smaller businesses to leverage enterprise-grade voice and data technology through a single solution platform which is easy to buy, build and manage. Soul has removed the typical barriers to entry by removing hardware and installation fees from a capital investment perspective," Levy added.

Linksys One is an unusual architecture: neither IP PBX nor IP centrex. All call processing is carried out by the individual SIP based IP phones. There is no switching functionality in either customer premises unit or hosted in the service provider's network on a softswitch. Secondly the system is designed to auto configure new devices as they are added, based the initial configuration set into the service router.