Fonality acquires trixbox

Fonality will announce tomorrow that they have acquired trixbox, formerly known as Asterisk@Home, and the the world's largest Asterisk-based community. Trixbox is a turn-key, bootable .iso CD image that can turn a PC with no OS into an Asterisk server with a variety of open source tools in just a few minutes. The trixbox application lets someone download a bootable .iso image that then automatically installs Linux, Asterisk, SugarCRM, MySQL, FreePBX, and a whole variety of other applications. Trixbox fully supports the Linux yum command and RPM ecosystem for performing updates and bug fixes.

Essentially, trixbox uses the latest and greatest version of Asterisk. Within 48 hours of a new Asterisk version, you see a new release of trixbox and they add their own host of patches they they put on top of that. These are basically patches of innovators inside the Asterisk community that didn't want to sign a double waiver. The double waiver extends the GPL agreement by stating the code has to also be given to Digium.

I spoke with Chris Lyman, the CEO of Fonality earlier this afternoon to talk about the acquisition of trixbox. He began by wondering how I figured out Fonality and trixbox were working closely together.

Chris: I don't know how you figured out on June 6th that we were getting involved with trixbox, but my hat goes off to you.

Tom: I recalled that I was wondering why Fonality would offer their hudlite, a real-time call control and presence management platform that works with the commercial (paid) Fonality PBXtra. I didn't understand why Fonality would want to make a "free" version of Asterisk (trixbox) more "feature-rich". Curious what the relationship was between Fonality and trixbox, I I did some detective work. Besides googling I also did registrar 'whois' lookups on hudlite.org (Fonality website) and trixbox.org and noticed that the IP addresses were the same - in other words - the same web server. Interesting to say the least, which is what sparked my June 6th post.

In my June 6th post, I pondered, "Did Fonality buy out the rights to Asterisk@Home and then change the name to Trixbox.org? What does this mean for the popular open-source Asterisk@Home distro (now Trixbox) considering Fonality is a for-profit Asterisk solutions provider? Is the plan to try and convert Trixbox users (generally novice Linux users) into paying Fonality users? Fonality certainly focuses on businesses that have little or no Linux experts, so there is certainly a potential synergy there. Well, the mystery continues... I'll post more when I hear back from Chris @Fonality." Chris Lyman and Andrew Gillis responded in a follow-up article.

In any event, it appears the seeds were sown for this acquisition back in June and that I was 4 months early in my pondering whether Fonality had acquired trixbox.

Tom: So what about the double waiver requirement to give the code back to Digium? Is this an advantage of trixbox since it doesn't have a double waiver?

Chris: There are a number of open source innovators that don't like that -- like faxing. The only reason why fax isn't in Asterisk, but they are using it in trixbox, is because the smart guy that made it (fax code) didn't want to sign that waiver over to Digium. So basically consider trixbox the latest greatest Asterisk plus a whole lot of innovation.

Tom: So what market are you going after with trixbox?

Chris: So in terms of what market we're going after with trixbox, we're not really going after a market. trixbox is really a community of Asterisk innovators and we're just going to be supporting that community. It's our way of supporting the platform that has been a big part of our success.

Tom: What is the value that trixbox brings to Fonality?

Chris: The value to Fonality is the community value.  The business value that trixbox brings is that there is probably a number of IT directors lurking in the trixbox community that are sort of trying for free, but really do want a commercial company to hold their hand when they roll out. And so we just want to make ourselves known that there is an option to go fully supported.

Tom: So by working within the community you hope to build brand awareness for your commercial-based Fonality PBXtra?

Chris: Yes, we want to build some brand awareness in the Asterisk community to let them know we are a serious player that has a 100% supported, 100% service model.

Chris: The trixbox forums has over 20,000 posts in the last 3 months. It has become the defacto place to get questions answered about Asterisk. Questions answered about rolling an open-source small business environment. And that's really the value we saw is - there are a lot of smart open-source people in that community.

Tom: What are the download numbers?

Chris: 1,500 people download trixbox every day, which is more than Digium. Mark was quoted in a Forbes article as saying 1,000 downloads per day and we were surprised since we averaged 50% more than that.

Tom: Any issues with people knowing about the trixbox brand and knowing that is the latest and greatest version of Asterisk?

Chris: I would say given our download numbers and given the fact that we get more downloads of Asterisk every day more than the rest of the world combined, I would say no, there is no brand problem.

Tom: So how is Fonality going to contribute to trixbox with this investment?

Chris: There's two things that are really really important for us to let the world and the community know. Number one is, trixbox was free, is free, and will always be free. And when I say, I mean pure GPL. It won't have a double waiver, you won't have to sign over any rights to Fonality, and we're not going to get into any of those complicated licensing schemes that you see with some other open source companies. Number two, we're contributing broad financial support to the trixbox platform to continue to improve that application. This is not just a community of that site that we're going to pay the bandwidth on. We actually have a host of engineers internally working on improving trixbox.

Tom: On a different note, any thoughts about integrating SugarCRM, MySQL, etc. onto the Fonality PBXtra hybrid-CPE-hosted solution for an "all in one box"?

Chris: Now that we are very much looking into. We've had talks with SugarCRM about it. Looking at ways of linking PBXtra and SugarCRM's contact center together on one box. That is a product you will probably see in the future from Fonality. I will say, my message to any business, be careful of how much load you point on a single server since it becomes a single point of failure for your business.

Tom: I know the Fonality code is a more secure and stable version of Asterisk but running an older Asterisk codebase, yet without sacrificing functionality. So I was wondering what percentage of code that is in trixbox is going to come back to Fonality?

Chris: Today, it is 0% because our version of Asterisk has been hardened aggressively over the last two and a half years. We think there may be a time if the Trixbox community requests it where we might give our version of our code to the community and call it you know, "stable". But really, more than anything the community wants the latest and greatest features and are willing to sacrifice a little bit of reliability to get there. And so unless we see a great need, we're not going to mix the two different flavors.

end interview...

One final point of note is that trixbox founder Andrew Gillis will join Fonality and continue to lead the trixbox community. The main takeways from this news is that Fonality will commit engineering resources and financial support to trixbox, and just as importantly, trixbox will continue to be 100% GPL without a double-waiver. Trixbox founder Andrew Gillis said, "Fonality shares my vision of making Asterisk free and easy for everyone. They have already proven to me how serious they are by committing a team of engineers to help create the next version of trixbox.

TrackBack (0) | Comments (0) | Tag with del.icio.us | VoIP & Gadget Blog | Permalink: Fonality acquires trixbox

Tags: asterisk, fonality, freepbx, linux, mysql, sugarcrm, trixbox, voip
Copyright VoIP & Gadgets Blog

Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on October 3rd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on VoIP and Asterisk and Linux and mysql and fonality and trixbox.

Trixbox founder responds

Both Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality, and Andrew Gillis, the founder of Asterisk@Home - now Trixbox, responded to my previous post pondering the relationship between Trixbox and Fonality. Long story short, it looks like the open-source Trixbox project is safe from any commercial intentions. Just a case of one Linux-based commercial company helping out a Linux hobbyist. You just gotta love the Linux community!

Also, interesting to read how the name "trixbox" came about:

Tom: So what’s the deal with Trixbox. I thought I read you were the registrar of this domain a few days ago, but now it’s registered to a registrar “anonymous” proxy service.

Chris: We helped him with the domain registration (we are old hosting guys, my CTO and I ran one of the largest hosting companies in the world before selling it to a telephone company in 2000.) Andrew may have changed the domain service when he got worried that it might appear that Fonality was trixbox.  (Actually I) checked about the domain. To be honest, I now do *not* think that my CTO helped him register the domain, but I could be wrong. But I do know that we are paying for the hosting of the site, and helped Andrew with a bunch of things including legal advice, etc.

Tom: Are you running the show with Trixbox – the replacement for Asterisk@Home?

Chris: No it is Andrew’s show. We provide him free hosting and bandwidth. He is very much the owner and leader of that community. Andrew and Fonality have begun to closely work together as of late because a) we wanted them to bake HUDlite into trixbox b) we wanted to get to know the Asterisk open source community a bit better. So far the relationship has been good. Andrew agreed to bake HUDlite into trixbox, which gives us access to all his users. And, he has taught us a lot about the mindset of the Asterisk hobbyist. In exchange we have done him some favors. We help sponsor him wherever we can, including: web-hosting, bandwidth, we sent him a PBXtra to play with, etc.

Tom: Anything behind the name change? Did Mark Spencer send a cease and desist to protect a trademark on the name “Asterisk”? (assuming he trademarked Asterisk)

Chris: Andrew told me that he got an email from Digium a long time ago, stating that Asterisk was their trademark. I didn’t know of any legal letter…so you may know more than I know.  I thought it was all pretty casual.

Tom: How much control (if any) do you have over the Trixbox development?

Chris: Very little. Unless Andrew really likes something I say to him I guess.

Tom: Is the plan to simply convert over Trixbox users to Fonality?

Chris: Trixbox is a free open source community – largely international. Fonality is a commercial paid product, largely domestic. We couldn’t be farther apart in communities, interest, or financial objectives. I guess our only real common ground is a usage and love of Asterisk.

And here's a response from Andrew from Trixbox regarding my blog post

Andrew: I created Asterisk@Home a year ago on a whim. I thought what a great idea to make Asterisk easy to install. It very quickly grew much bigger than I thought it would. One day Digium contacted me and told me that Asterisk is their trademark but I could use it as long as my project remained totally open source.

This sounded good from the start but it put restrictions of the product such as loosing the ability to use free (not open source) software. Then theres my user base. As it turns out most of my users were running Asterisk@Home for business and they didn’t like the name.

The Asterisk@Home name also pigeon holes the product into being an Asterisk distribution. I want to make it more than that and include other type of software. I want it to do more tricks. So the new name trixbox.

I do own the trixbox.org name. I register all my domains using anonymous servers. Hope this helps out. If you are interested in doing a review of trixbox or an interview with me. Just let me know.

TrackBack (0) | Comments (0) | Tag with del.icio.us

Tags: asterisk, fonality, trixbox, voip
Copyright VoIP & Gadgets Blog

Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on June 7th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on VoIP and Asterisk and fonality and trixbox.

trixbox 2.0 released

trixbox 2.0 beta will be available for download on Wednesday. This release will be Fonality’s first big contribution to the trixbox/Asterisk community after the recent Fonality acquisition of trixbox. which certainly caused a stir within the Asterisk community. I spoke with Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality, to find out more about this major new release of trixbox.

First, I should point out that while previous version of trixbox have always been the easiest way to get Asterisk up and running in just minutes, trixbox 2.0 is much more than that.  First and foremost, trixbox 2.0 includes a new ‘overall’ web GUI to make the whole process "point and click". From this new web GUI you can simply select the modules you want (HUDLite, FreePBX, PHP, lame, etc.) and the web interface will automatically install them. Some of the packages are directly related to Asterisk such as HUDlite or FreePBX, while other options are ancillary, such as SugarCRM. The idea is you shouldn’t have to know anything about the command line interface (CLI). In addition, many users wishing to install trixbox want to keep the server as unbloated as possible and not add any unnecessary modules/packages.

Continue reading trixbox 2.0 released…

TrackBack (1) | Comments (0) | Tag with del.icio.us | VoIP & Gadget Blog | Permalink: trixbox 2.0 released

Tags: asterisk, laamp, laamps, lamp, mysql, sugarcrm, trixbox, trixbox 2.0, voip
Copyright VoIP & Gadgets Blog

Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on January 1st, 1970 with no comments.
Read more articles on VoIP and Asterisk and mysql and trixbox.

Fonality launches new PBXtra Professional Edition

Fonality, provider of Asterisk-based IP telephony solutions (including trixbox 2.0), today announced the release of its new PBXtra Professional Edition IP-PBX and HUD (Heads-Up Display) Team application. I spoke with Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality to get the scoop on this news. The short take is that PBXtra Professional Edition is a notch up from their Standard Edition targetting larger businesses that aren't necessarily call centers, scaling from 50 to 500 seats with enterprise-class features. Similarly, HUD Pro is launching, which is a big upgrade of HUD, offering more features that are interesting to larger companies - more on that later. The most interesting thing Chris said to me was this, "The whole point of this launch is to start taking on the PBX giants. This isn't like 'Are we competitive in the Asterisk space?' We know that we're the leaders of that space, ok? This is about 'can we take on Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel - with feature-parity for 50/60/70% price reduction.' "

If you think that statement is controversial, you should see the firestorm started by Voxilla's Marcelo Rodriguez in his inaccurate portrayal of Fonality as "unsecure" and open to an unscrupulous Fonality employee "spying" on their customer's networks. Marcelo even goes as far as to say customers are better of using Digium over Fonality when he says, "But those concerned about keeping company secrets are probably better served by Digium's offering. " I'm going to stay out of that battle, but it's worth checking out to see Chris Lyman's point-by-point rebuttal to Marcelo's assertions.

Getting back to today's news on their new PBXtra Professional  Edition, Chris said, "On the PBXtra Pro side, this news brings is more scalability in terms of supporting more larger groups of extensions, faster - more concurrent calls - faster reporting - all the things that you need in a bigger office."

Tom: What did you do to make Asterisk more scalable?
Chris: What we've done on the web admin site is we re-engineered our entire back-end API to handle many more concurrent connections and easier management of multiple systems. We originally built that web interface to handle systems under 100 seats. So very difficult to manage as you got up into the hundreds of seats, it was hard to navigate, it was slow."

The newly re-engineered web interface lets you easily hotswitch from one branch office to another for configuring users, making adds/changes/etc.

Tom: You're using MySQL on the back-end, correct?

Continue reading Fonality launches new PBXtra Professional Edition...

TrackBack (1) | Comments (0) | Tag with del.icio.us | VoIP & Gadget Blog | Permalink: Fonality launches new PBXtra Professional Edition

Tags: asterisk, fonality, hud team, pbxtra, pbxtra professional edition, trixbox, voip
Copyright VoIP & Gadgets Blog

Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on January 1st, 1970 with no comments.
Read more articles on VoIP and Asterisk and fonality and trixbox.

Who is redirecting trixbox/Asterisk@Home web traffic?

Have you noticed how http://www.asteriskathome.com points to http://www.asterisknow.org/, a site that promotes AsteriskNOW, a new software distribution that includes a customized version of Linux, Asterisk, the Asterisk GUI, and all other software needed for an Asterisk system. AsteriskNOW is promoted as an easy to install turnkey installation when it says, "AsteriskNOW includes all the Linux components necessary to run, debug and build Asterisk, and only those components, so installation is easy." Doesn't this turnkey Asterisk sounds eerily similar to the old Asterisk@Home project which was recently renamed to trixbox?

The site www.asteriskathome.com is offering a competing product to trixbox (Asterisk@Home), which is now owned by Fonality. Fonality is a company that sells PBXtra and is a competitor to Digium.. www.asterisknow.org, where asteriskathome.com redirects to, is registered to you guessed it -- Digium Inc. which now offers an Asterisk distro that "aims" to be as easy to install as trixbox/Asterisk@home. Quite a nice rivalry, eh? While I applaud Digium for adding a GUI and making AsteriskNOW an easy to install Asterisk distro, why take a domain name associated with a competing Asterisk distro and competing company? My first thoughts on this were:

Why even go there? Is Digium’s goal to rank highly on the search engines for the search term “asterisk at home” or “asterisk@home” so that they direct people to their competing solution?. Seems a bit childish.

Personally, I doubt most Asterisk fans aren’t already aware that Asterisk@Home is now trixbox, so I doubt Digium will get any search engine referral traffic even if they did rank highly for the keywords. I’ve been to Digium’s offices and I know they are filled with many smart Linux people, so surely they know they won’t get any SEO benefit from registering www.asteriskathome.com. So is the motive simply because they could do it or should we view this as a childish prank?

When I visited Digium's offices I heard a group of employees playing some Linux shoot-em up game and shouting (gotta love that corporate environment). Now, I can only picture a group of Linux gurus huddled around, as they clicked the Submit button to register this asteriskathome.com domain followed by a few chuckles. But then it occurred to me that perhaps Digium wasn't involved with this at all. I checked the whois directory and saw that the domain was registered to Mitchel Constantin from a company called Dirty Clothing. I googled his name and see that he is indeed on Asterisk's mailing lists and seems very involved with the community - however he doesn't appear to be a Digium employee.

After some further investigation I discovered he works for or wrote the Asterisk application called Snap, that includes a dialer and call popup application for Asterisk with Outlook integration and a Firefox plugin. Actually, this seems like a pretty cool app that I'll have to check out.

Obviously, Mitchel is a huge Digium fan, the company that founded the Asterisk movement, and which apparently has spawned at least one 'domain turf battle' by a devoted (zealous?) Digium fan.

Lame to take this domain & direct it to Digium's website? Or pretty funny?
You make the call.

TrackBack (0) | Comments (2) | Tag with del.icio.us | VoIP & Gadget Blog | Permalink: Who is redirecting trixbox/Asterisk@Home web traffic?

Tags: asterisk, digium, fonality, trixbox, voip
Copyright VoIP & Gadgets Blog

Comments on this Entry:

(roderickm on Dec 5, 2006 6:54 PM) Asterisk is a trademark of Digium. The project formerly known as Asterisk@Home was renamed “Trixbox.” How is it childish to protect legitimate trademarks?

(John Ferrel on Dec 6, 2006 9:39 AM) >>Asterisk is a trademark of Digium. The project formerly known as Asterisk@Home was renamed “Trixbox.” How is it childish to protect legitimate trademarks? A valid assertion, except there are plenty of cases of people using the name "Asterisk" within their domain name. Asterisk VoIP Blog - http://asteriskvoip.blogspot.com/ is one example. Even the infamous Apple Blog (http://theappleblog.com) uses the trademarked Apple in its domain name. I'm sure there are hundreds of other cases. I don't believe Digium sued Asterisk@Home to try and get them to reliquish the rights to the Asterisk@Home name. In fact, I remember reading Tom's blog post stating that Digium had given Asterisk@Home permission to use the name. Trixbox 1.0 replaces Asterisk@Home Here's 2 important snippets: [snip 1] "I can speculate that my pal Mark Spencer over at Digium sent Asterisk@Home a "cease & desist letter" to protect his trademark. Although, I'm not sure if Mark even has a trademark on the brand "Asterisk". I'll have to shoot him off an email and ask. But if he does, then you can't blame him if he is indeed trying to protect his brand. If you don't vigorously protect your brand and it becomes watered down and used by everyone, then you can lose your rights to the trademark. This whole point may be moot since I believe you can't trademark GPL open-source code projects. Where's a trademark lawyer when you need one?" [snip 2] "Update: I received an email from Ward Mundy stating that Digium did give permission to use the Asterisk@Home name. He stated "Asterisk@Home was suitable for home and business use. A lot of customers were apparently put off by the @Home moniker." I suppose I can see the @Home moniker hurting its "business-class" image." Taking the asteriskathome.com domain does seem to be a bit infantile, especially since the Asterisk@Home project no longer exists. It's now Trixbox. Of course I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of old webpages that talk about Asterisk@Home that aren't updated. So any Asterisk newbies that see Asterisk@Home mention might be tempted to google it and come across Digium's website instead. A form of stealth marketing I suppose. Still, like Tom said, the chances of asteriskathome.com getting any search engine traffic is small. Currently this domain is not even on the first page of Google. In fact, http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/ is #1 and it points to the trixbox Asterisk distribution. I won't classify this tactic "lame", especially since it doesn't appear to be done by a direct Digium employee. It is somewhat amusing to us in the Asterisk community to see two different factions play some relatively friendly war games. Just as long as they don't go hacking each other's websites, I'm cool with it.

Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on January 1st, 1970 with no comments.
Read more articles on VoIP and Asterisk and fonality and digium and trixbox.

Worldwide weather forecasts on Asterisk-based trixbox

Nerd Vittles is not only an Asterisk junkie, he's a weather junkie too. Nerd Vittles is at it again with a tutorial on how to receive worldwide weather forecasts on the Asterisk-based trixbox IP-PBX software platform. It retrieves the weather info from a website and then allows you to dial into the trixbox server to retrieve weather information using text-to-speech.

Apparently, it is one of the most requested features that Nerd Vittles receives. Personally, I just head over to weather.com via any browser. Or if I'm not on a PC or browser-capable cellphone, I can use WAP - available on just about any cellphone to retrieve weather from Yahoo! or other Internet sites. But who am I to judge people who need their weather fix by any means necessary? Go check out the tut.

TrackBack (0) | Comments (0) | Tag with del.icio.us | VoIP & Gadget Blog | Permalink: Worldwide weather forecasts on Asterisk-based trixbox

Tags: Asterisk, forecasts, Nerd Vittles, trixbox, weather
Copyright VoIP & Gadgets Blog

Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on January 1st, 1970 with no comments.
Read more articles on Asterisk and trixbox.

Fonality gets financial boost from Intel

Fonality, makers of Asterisk-based PBXtra and the free trixbox Asterisk-based distribution, has secured
$7 million in a Series C round led by Intel Capital with participation from existing investor, Azure Capital Partners. It's a little known fact, but Intel Capital is the largest VC funding company in the world and of course if owned by well-known Intel, Inc.

I spoke with Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality, on Monday discuss this news. Chris said, "Fonality didn't need another round of capital, but we were intested in a strategic round if we felt that it was a business that could take us to the next level - given that we are already profitable and we still have money in the bank from the last round. It has to be very interesting to get us to move and Intel is for a lot of reasons a very interesting company." Chris also mentioned that when approached with the opportunity to leverage Intel's worldwide distribution channel as part of the funding deal, it was something Fonality couldn't pass up.

In fact, Chris stated, "What most people don't realize is that Intel is 150,000 resellers. So we're more than a little excited to get exposed to that channel." When I asked, "So as part of this announcement you'll be able to go through Intel's channel?", Chris responded, "Well, I wouldn't say that's a part of this announcement, because it's a very young relationship, but that's certainly one of the primary reasons we were interested in them as a funding partner."

I responded "So it opens the door for you to use their channel" and Chris said, "It opens the door into their channel, it opens the door potentially to a closer hardware relationship with Intel. You know, Intel has always been interested in telephony, as proven by their Dialogic investment and then recent divestiture. When they divested Dialogic it doesn't mean they aren't interested in telephony. In my opinion, they are more interested in the future of telephony versus the past."

Chris also mentioned that the VC funding would be used to increasing product innovation for both the trixbox open source platform, and the PBXtra commercial product line. Further, the funding would be used to aggressively grow its channel presence, with a strong focus on international distribution, with support from Intel.

"Pairing industry standard hardware, such as Intel server and communication platforms, with open source telephony software can create a unique ecosystem that results in lower cost, high-end features, better ease-of-use and the potential for richer telephony environments down the road," said Lisa Lambert, managing director, Software and Solutions Group, Intel Capital. "Fonality is positioned to deliver this solution to the global mid-market and increase PC penetration in the emerging market for open source telephony."

In addition, Fonality told me they will announce the trixbox Open Communications Certification (FtOCC) workshop, the first in a series of training and certification courses for the trixbox application platform. The course will be held in Los Angeles on March 5th and 6th and will focus on VoIP, PBX deployment, network assessment, telephony troubleshooting, T1/PRI training, and IP handset education. The goal of the FtOCC is to arm data VARs, system integrators and telephony professionals with the knowledge needed to deploy and manage PBX installations for businesses from 1 to 1,000 employees. For more information visit www.trixbox.org

TrackBack (1) | Comments (0) | Tag with del.icio.us | VoIP & Gadget Blog | Permalink: Fonality gets financial boost from Intel

Tags: Asterisk, Fonality, FtOCC, Intel Capital, PBXtra, trixbox, VoIP
Copyright VoIP & Gadgets Blog

Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on January 1st, 1970 with no comments.
Read more articles on VoIP and Asterisk and fonality and trixbox.