In a very interesting Asterisk-related development, news is coming out today that Fonality has purchased Trixbox (formerly Asterisk@Home). Trixbox is a free, popular, and easily-installable GUI version of Asterisk, and Fonality is the company behind the very successful PBXtra Asterisk-based IP PBX. Clearly this move increases Fonality’s presence in this space and it will be interesting to see what they do with Trixbox and how they interact with the open source community. It’s certainly good to hear that Fonality is hiring Trixbox founder Andrew Gillis and that he’ll continue to lead the Trixbox community. The press release also makes it clear that Fonality intends to keep Trixbox free and open source (under the GPL license).
Trixbox will remain an open source project licensed under the general public license (GPL), which encourages innovative software development both within the Asterisk environment and the larger open source community.
“Trixbox is a thriving Asterisk community, unencumbered by licensing complexities. It was free, it is free and we are going to make sure it stays free.” said Chris Lyman, Fonality’s CEO and founder.
Tom Keating was way in front with this story, speculating about it in June and breaking the news and posting an in-depth interview with Fonality CEO Chris Lyman last night. Alec Saunders observes that this move really places Fonality in direct competition with Digium. I’m going to be speaking to Chris myself tomorrow, and I’ll follow up and post some more thoughts on this deal after our conversation.
Hopefully Fonality will not take an otherwise nice product and manage to trash it. We have been struggling with a Fonality system for 14 months with limited success, but the icing on the cake was the Oct 21st upgrade that rendered our system (and many others from what we hear)esentially dead for 2 days. They need to focus on delivery of their core product, or maybe they realize that is futile so they are going to use Trixbox as their new UI.
This is great news and congrats to Chris!
Crusecom Technology Inc, located in Oscoda, Michigan provides call center operations with the Fonality Call Center PBXtra. We average approximately 3000+ calls per day, the calls are less than 2 minutes in duration and are process with an average of 27 CSR on staff.
We selected Fonality based on the small business model and cost. On our initial deployment we tried to save on cost by purchasing the smaller system but quickly realized that our hardware selection would not meet our performance requirements or disaster recovery initiatives.
We upgraded and expanded our solution to the Fonality HP server and only integrating the required T1 lines to the system. We doubled the CPU/RAM and increased our T1 count (from 1 to 3) and added roll over capabilities.
By reviewing and analyzing our technical solution, Crusecom has been able to exceed our client expectation in areas of client satisfaction, call volume and reporting. The Fonality support services for the application and hardware has by far exceeded my expectation and we look forward to new opportunities and challenges with new and current client utilizing the Fonality products and services.
The Fonality support team and management are there to help any client take the necessary steps to determine and analyze your objectives and aggressively support your technology goals.
We would recommend Fonality to any organization that is moving forward with expanding their operation and moving toward a fully supported VoIP solution.
Art Cruse
President/CEO
http://crusecom.com