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| Switchvox Admin |
Now I'm up to 3 new IP-PBXs I never heard of that I discovered in just one day! I hope this is the last IP-PBX I hadn't heard of this week. Feels like my IP-PBX knowledge and "VoIP IQ" is going down by the second!
I just got this email an hour ago from Joshua Stephens, the CEO of Switchvox where he mentions that he has a pre-installed, easy-to-use "plug and play" IP-PBX based on Asterisk.
Ok, before the day is out, anyone else want to try and test my IP-PBX trivia? Go ahead and send me a link to an IP-PBX I never heard of. C'mon, I dare ya!!
Anyway, here's the email from Switchvox with some useful info...
I thought I'd let you know about our new product.
Switchvox is our All-in-one PBX based on Asterisk. As you noted in your review of OnDO, Asterisk is not known for being easy to set up. That's where we come in. Switchvox comes pre-installed and any hardware you might choose is pre-configured, as are any phones you purchase. It's not just Asterisk installed and configured though, there's an extensive Web interface for controlling and configuring all aspects of the system. Some of the features that you might find interesting are:
Interactive Voice Response - A point and click interface exists for recording new sounds, uploading sounds, and tieing those sounds together with numeric options (press 1 for sales) to build any interactive menu you might need. The actions the IVR is capable of performing are so numerous it's hard to get into it here.
Queues - Set up Queues to make sure callers get answered, and answered in the right order. Users can log into or out of the queue, when they're logged in they get calls.
Advanced call routing - We can, depending on your connection to the PSTN, route your calls to particular extensions based on the phone number dialed, the line it came in on, or in the case of providers that support it, based on the distinctive ring pattern provided.
Programmable interface - For people a bit more technical, we allow users to write web apps on their own servers for serving up data to people through the IVR. For example this might be used to allow an IVR menu in Switchvox to pull up people's accounts and read their balance back to them.
Flash Switchboard - We have written a flash interface that talks back to the server, allowing users to see who's calling them, place calls on hold, park calls, send calls to voicemail, and create conference rooms. This can help make a simple one line phone seem like a multi-line office phone.
Additionally, if one is provided by an external server, we can send a URL to the person answering the phone. For example, this URL could be a page displaying the caller's account.
We have a more detailed list of features on our web site www.switchvox.com as well as a few screenshots. Check it out. If you have any questions, be sure to let me know. We have a demo server set up, if you're interested in trying the software.
We'll be at the Linux Desktop Summit in February, if you're in town, stop by.
Thanks,
--Josh
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Hi Tom
I have another one you may not yet have heard of. It's called Packetbox, a preinstalled appliance that contains anti-spam, anti-virus solutions, ipsec for vpn's, groupware and a customized Asterisk solution with web based interface and flash panel. You can find more information about it at http://www.packetbox.net. The device retails at around 1000 Euro.
bye
tom
Ever heard of the sippstar IP-PBX software?
It´s an IP-PBX software for small and medium companies, developed by the makers of the CD/DVD recording software NERO.
bye
Mathias
Here is one that you might not of heard of:
www.fonality.com
I heard they are the largest commercial Asterisk play.
I am located in Vancouver, and they even have their tentacles up here.
-marc
Save your SPAM Katz.
Everyone, this Katz person is obviously affiliated with Fonality so take his posts with a grain of salt. These guys are posting their SPAM all over the internet on VoIP forums like they are just happy customers when in fact they are associated with the company financially!
I will NOT ever recommend Fonality for 3 reasons.
1) I don't like companies who try to prop themselves up using multiple handles on various sites disgused as happy customers.
2) They use FUD techniques to put down their competition. Namely, SwitchVox.
3) Their business model, like their marketing techniques, is dubious at best. They use a hosted server for the GUI so you are essentially buying NOTHING but an expensive server and open source software (Asterisk) which you could easily do on your own. You MUST continue to pay them an annual fee to continue to use their hosted software. If they go down you are left with NOTHING! GUI gone, bye bye!
Dear Mr. Fred Flint,
Hi there. I caught your posting above as I was reading our article in Tom's blog. You seem to have two main concerns with Fonality.
1. Fonality is "using multiple handles on various sites disguised as happy customers". I am not sure what you are referring to here. I have posted all over the Web using my name. For instance read a posting of mine on dslreports.com: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,13334267?hilite=pbx
Also, forgive me for asking, but is your name really Fred Flint or is that a “handle”? :>|
2. You seem a bit confused about our business model. You write: "You must continue to pay them an annual fee for their hosted software". Actually, there is no annual fee to use PBXtra. You may use the software forever upon original purchase.
I think I may know the source of your confusion. Fonality *does* have an optional support-and-software-maintenance fee. Let me tell you about it:
The cost is $50-$70 per extension per year (based on size of deployment). That comes out to be about $4-6 per extension per month. Here is what you get for that:
a. Unlimited free phone and email support.
b. Unlimited free software upgrades.
This fee is 100% optional. Why do we have it? Well, first it takes money to pay for a support team. Customers want excellent and prompt support and that takes money.
That covers the support bit. Now let's talk about the software maintenance bit: Fonality has released 13 versions of its software since January. These versions come loaded with new features (and a few bug fixes too!). Not one of these version releases required a customer to download anything, or reboot their PBXtra servers. In fact, most customers had no idea there was a new release. They simply woke up in the morning and had a whole bunch of new features. That is why we have chosen to make our software Web-based. We are able to attain an increasing economy of scale, and pass those savings down to our customers.
The second reason we have chosen to make our PBX management software web-based, is so that it can reside *outside* the firewall. This means that our customers (typically small businesses without a team of dedicated IT personnel), can use the software from anywhere in the world! For instance, employees can log into our user control panel and listen to their voicemail, turn on call forwarding/find-me, click-n-call people back etc. The can do this from a hotel room while on the road. This means the admin can browse from home (on a Saturday morning) and change the way schedule calls are routing to the support dep't. Our customers find this model much easier. They don't have the time (or know-how) to:
1. Open ports in a firewall.
2. Run a local Web-server.
3. Deal with the challenge of dynamic IP addresses on a LAN.
We think the future of telephony is about mobility services...to be truly mobile you have to be able to change environments without affecting the way you work. This is the underlying concept to our outside-the-firewall web-based approach. Hope it makes more sense now.
Let me know if you are interested in a demo. Call 877-FONALITY and press 1 for sales.
Sincerely,
Chris Lyman
Fonality Founder & CEO
P.S. We launched version 2.2 of our software on Friday. It has over 20 new features!
Hi Chris,
I liked your product, and I was just about to order. However, I was faced with something that totally turned me off. Basically, the sales told me that (I Can't install softphones and them to the system myself). It has to be configured by fonality AND should be purchased from fonality. So, everytime I need to install a softphone, even for the same user (home, laptop, work) I have to pay about $100 for each installation!
That's doesn't make sense at all.
Essam,
Hi there. I can understand your frustration with Fonality’s pricing and approach to softphones. Perhaps, it would help if I gave you our reasoning and what finally drove us to stop offering them for free.
For the last year or two, we have allowed our customers to use whatever softphones they wanted. Usually these were free, low-quality, and discontinued softphones like Xten-lite. We also told our customers to use whatever headset they wanted. What was the result? They weren’t pretty - poor audio quality, trouble registering the phone, problems with dynamic IP addressing, NAT-traversal issues. You know, your basic Easter Sunday basket full of support nightmares. Of course, our customers would then call our tech support and burn up hours of our time helping them debug unknown softphones, with unknown configurations, using unknown headsets. Our support department worked diligently to provide customer service for products we didn’t understand and that we hadn’t been paid for.
So, finally our support group, ineffective and overworked, gave up. We created a policy to *not* officially support softphones anymore. Basically, we created a "use at your own risk" policy. You can imagine that went over pretty well. Customers still called us for support. Customers still had all the same issues. Now we were just the bad guys.
So, what did we do? We went out and contracted with Xten (now CounterPath) and purchased a license for their $30 Eyebeam product. Now we know our customers will be using the best softphone on the market.
We then closed a deal with Plantronics to bundle their headsets with our new softphone. This way, if customers have quality problems, at least we can say: "First try the headset we mailed to you with your softphone". This provides us "control" in the scientific process of diagnosis.
Both of these partnerships (CounterPath & Plantronics) cost us significant capital.
We then had our engineering group write automated provisioning software to make the softphone work correctly with PBXtra both inside the office and in telecommuter fashion - even when the telecommuters IP address is dynamically changing, or they are behind firewalls which change the headers of the SIP packets.
Then there comes the support of the softphone. Over the past year, we have estimated that the support of softphones cost us 3x the support of hardphones. However, we decided *not* to charge any extra to support our softphone customers. Some, but not all, of that cost-of-support will be made up in our pricing of the softphone.
So, how much do we charge for the softphone? We charge $49 for both the softphone and the bundled Plantronics headset. Then we charge a $45 fee to provision and configure the softphone for use within your office and as a telecommuter.
I realize that this fee may be offensive to some - but it is imperative that your PBX Company stay in business for a long time. The only way to do that is to price our products and services reasonably enough to allow us to both break even and make a modest profit. If we kept the server at $995 and the phones free, there would be no money left over to pay the engineers or the support team.
I realize that none of my explanation made the price any lower, and for that I am sorry. But I hope you realize that we are sincerely here for the long-haul and must be very careful not to price ourselves into bankruptcy, as so many companies did during the 1990s.
Sincerely,
Chris Lyman, CEO
Fonality, Inc.
http://www.fonality.com
Chris,
You say that you guys do not Spam competitors postings? How do you explain this posting?
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Switchvox
The person's IP that posted it tracks back to.
Fonality
Marc Smookler (btabernacle@gmail.com)
6133 Bristol Parkway, Suite 150
Culver City
CA,90230
I am guessing you knew nothing about these practices and will be having a talk with gentlemen about this right?
Chris,
I also find it very interesting that you state.... "Usually these were free, low-quality, and discontinued softphones like Xten-lite." Seems to me XTen-Lite is alive and well. They just released version 3.0 of the software a few months ago. Oh by the way, no quality issues here with Switchvox and Xten.
How do I know this might you ask? I support a SwitchVox enviroment.
Dave,
I have seen that post on voip-info, and it doesnt say anything about tracking from his source IP to the fonality WhoIs record, I maybe wrong, and that person may be a Fonality employee, but as far as I know the poster who pointed it out is not a site admin and has no access to other posters IPs - just because he looked up the Whois for pbxtra.com and found an email address that is slightly similar to that persons handle does not in any way tie them together.
I don't sell or endorse fonality, but I do know about their business, and I can honestly say Chris and his team are good people providing a good service.
Hi,
I've done my research and compared Fonality with Switchvox. My choice for my company and a few of our clients was Switchvox. I like the freedom and complete implementation of Switchvox. We have our system up and running even at times when Internet goes down. Try that with Fonality! Also I was very impressed by responses I got during pre-sales research from Switchvox. They answered all my direct questions promptly and to the point. Also I was very impressed by getting answers often within an hour even after hours and on the weekends.
I asked both Fonality and Switchvox at the same time. Fonality responded in 4 days. Instead of direct technical answers, their response started from BS points about "the world's largest distributed deployment of Asterisk", "over 1,300 Asterisk customers in the U.S. and abroad", "customers have now made over 50,000,000 calls", "18 successive months of double digit revenue growth.", like if I care about any of it if their solution may be not the right fit for my needs to begin with.
Anyway I've made my choice and recommended the same to some of our clients who are very happy with Switchvox. I am also personally pretty happy with Switchvox support.
Regards,
Vlad Mayzel, Operations Manager
604-GET-HELP On-Site Computer Services.