Fonality is updating its business phone system to detect when
users are tapping away at their keyboards—as well as when, how and
where to find them if they’re not.
Fonality on March 4 is announcing a major upgrade to its
business phone system—the PBXtra 4.0—that promises to sniff employees out and
forward calls to their cell phones if it detects that they're not tapping away
at their keyboards.
PBXtra 4.0's new FindMe feature allows users to stipulate when and how they
can be tracked down, based on personal schedules and rules, but it also has new
built-in presence detection that can pick up on users' keyboard and mouse
activities, routing calls to users' cell phones if all is quiet on their PC.
Fonality is the purveyor of a hybrid
hosted IP PBX and IP-based calling service that's built on the open-source Asterisk IP PBX.
Fonality
set out to lower voice call costs for SMBs when it launched its hybrid hosted
IP PBX offering and IP-based calling service. Click here for the story.
Fonality is following other telephony vendors that are increasingly
implementing find-me-follow-me call-forwarding services, which allow users to
receive calls at any location, in the case of find me, or to allow users to be
reached at any of several phone numbers, in the case of follow me.
The PBXtra upgrade includes FindMe with Boomerang Mobile Integration, a
presence detection feature that automatically finds employees on their mobile
devices, allowing them to either answer the call or to bounce it to any other
extension by just pressing a few keys. A user can also now dial *1 to record a
mobile call and store it automatically on the PBXtra server.
Fonality CEO Chris Lyman said that the
upgrade, which is free to any Fonality customer who pays an annual technical
support fee, will be downloaded automatically for more than 4,000 customers,
who "won't have to lift a finger."
"Our data center takes care of it all," he said.
Compare that to Cisco or Avaya, whose technicians show up in trucks with
software under their arms to do any point release and charge $150 per hour for
the dubious privilege of getting upgraded, Lyman said. It's just another
example of why Fonality came into being in the first place, Lyman said, given
that its founders were "disgusted at the pricing of the big guys—the
Alcatels, the Nortels … the your-mom's-tel's."
"They all build proprietary phone systems in what's a big market—a $20
billion market worldwide. We needed a phone system for a prior business and
screamed when we got the price tag back," he said. "We said, ‘We've
got to beat this; we've got to beat it back.'"
Fonality dragged its prices down by using commoditized PC hardware, from
Dell or the like, with low-cost phones that it doesn't make itself. The company
also cut prices by using open-source software. The third leg of the low-cost
telephony stool was to ditch the need for technicians to climb into trucks and
charge $150 an hour, achieved with a network of resellers who make changes and
upgrades from their offices, over the Internet.
Thus was born Fonality's hybrid hosted offering. It didn't make sense to
investors at first blush, but at this point, it has one, very large believer:
Dell. Dell in January let it be known that it's making
a play for the SMB VOIP space by partnering with Fonality and Nortel: two
open-source IP telephony and Unified Communications vendors whose software Dell
will bundle with its hardware to offer easily managed products that
self-install and promise to save small companies time and money.
Dell
is plugging in IP telephony products from Fonality and Nortel to bring VOIP to
the masses in a set of integrated, plug-in boxes. Click here for the story.
Other new features in PBXtra 4.0 include a new plug-in, called FONcall, for
Firefox browsers that turns any phone number on any site into a link. Clicking
the link then automatically takes a Fonality Aastra phone or a Fonality Polycom
conference phone off the hook and dials out to the number, hands-free.
PBXtra 4.0 is also designed to tie branch offices tighter together by
merging spell-by-name directories, meaning a caller only has to dial in to one
branch and can then reach employees at any other branch.
Other new features include a consolidated interface for resellers to manage
their PBXtra customers from a central, Web-based interface, with hot-switching
enabled between installations. Resellers now will also be able to receive
alerts in e-mail to text messages when issues arise with a PRI, RAID disk,
analog line voltage and other areas. Also, PBXtra now lets administrators
automatically configure country-appropriate telecom settings on servers. One
other new feature is a new network card configuration option that enables
custom configuration of analyst and PRI and T-1 cards.
