FonalityCRM

November 5, 2007

Fonality has made quite a splash in the open source communications market and the most recent news coming out of the California company is an acquisition of Insightful Solutions Pty Ltd, one of the world’s largest SugarCRM development houses.

I had an opportunity to have a podcast interview with Fonality CEO Chris Lyman about the acquisition, the future of telephony, CRM, unified communications and the market in general.

As part of the transaction, Fonality will also begin selling Insightful’s SugarCRM managed service offering called FonalityCRM. The solution is integrated with PBXtra and trixbox Pro and provides click-to-call dialing, agent screen pops, telephone campaign management for outbound sales teams, and a host of other features. It is hosted at one of the six Fonality data centers and available immediately to PBXtra and trixbox Pro customers worldwide. The underlying FonalityCRM managed service platform was developed by Insightful to provide a complete on-demand offering that is updated, maintained, backed-up and available 24x7.

As you may expect, Fonality will leverage Insightful’s knowledge and experience when supporting SugarCRM deployments, as well as support of its other solutions.

This acquisition is infinitely logical and also provides a tipping point in the open-source market. Prior to this time, you might have considered open-source solutions to be entry-level in nature. Now, with the capabilities discussed in this podcast, you can see that an open-source communications solution actually eclipses many other proprietary solutions generally available.