Dell set to shake-up SME IP-PBX market with Fonality

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 24 January 2008 03:55

IT Industry - Strategy

Last November Fonality bought Australian company Insightful Solutions Pty Ltd, a provider of hosted customer relationship management services based on the SugarCRM product. Fonality said at the time it wanted to break into the regional IP-PBX market and also planned to integrate it IP-PBX products with hosted SugarCRM.

Just the day before the Dell news broke, Insightful announced it would be releasing the Fonality trixbox Pro IP PBX into Australia. Insightful Solutions CEO, Marc Englaro, said: "trixbox Pro is an affordable, highly functional and scalable software-based IP PABX system that delivers enterprise-class features at small business prices. These features include auto-attendant, unified messaging between voicemail and email, in-house conference rooms, branch locations, home workers and presence management. In addition to traditional PSTN dialing and PBX features, trixbox Pro includes an embedded corporate chat server, advanced call centre features and the ability to integrate with Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce.com and SugarCRM."

According to Englaro, the trixbox use Asterisk for switching and Fonality software for management and the end product is a hybrid offering in which the switching is carried out on premises and management is hosted.

trixbox Pro has been named as winner of the Internet Telephony Product of the Year Award for 2007. It is available immediately in Australia and New Zealand from Insightful, pricing starts at $A1,685 + $7.05 p/month ex GST.