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?

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