OnRelay Chooses open source sipXecs to Power Mobile Telephony

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OnRelay Chooses open source sipXecs to Power Mobile Telephony

OnRelay today announced its support of sipXecs, an open source platform to provide low-cost business telephony with mobile extensions. OnRelay's Hosted MBX with sipXecs allows businesses to deploy a mobile office communication system (mobile PBX) with no additional investment in infrastructure: no desk phones, proprietary PBXs or cabling. With MBX the mobile phone is the only "desk phone" employees require.

Interviewing CEO Ivar Plahte he stated, "The reason why we chose sipXecs over Asterisk is the architecture and the philosophies behind the software was very similar to how we think and how we work here. Because we are pretty fanatic about object-oriented (programming). It seemed to be a good fit in how things were designed and modeled. It has some very strong focus on SIP and we figured it could do what we needed it to do. We did some feasability studies and it really came out on top when we did some proto-typing."

OnRelay's software supports LDAP and Active Directory for automatic provisioning. It also leverages IMAP for unified messaging capabilities. The current MBX system allows an enterprise to keep their PBX but replace their desktop phones with cellphones for true mobile productivity. MBX connects to an existing PBX via a CTI interface and "mobilizes" it, giving full PBX functionality on the mobile phone itself via an application you load onto supported mobile handsets. It's not a WiFi or softphone application. It actually works directly over 3G and EVDO. It uses the standard mobile network as the voice bearer but uses signalling across the mobile data connection which is handled in parallel by the software application loaded onto supported smart phones.

Today's open source announcement opens the benefits of OnRelay Hosted MBX to the small to medium enterprise (SME) market. By choosing the leading open source PBX sipXecs, OnRelay can offer a plug and play office communication system at a SME segment price-point.

"OnRelay's support of open source means that SMEs can benefit from the flexibility and features of a fully fledged mobile PBX," notes OnRelay CEO, Ivar Plahte. "Other hosted PBX alternatives such as Centrex take an over simplified, cookie-cutter approach to enterprise telephony. They fail to offer the rich functionality SMEs require in today's converging world. Open source brings feature richness and internet-level scalability to OnRelay's mobile PBX platform."

According to Ovum's practice leader for mobile, Jeremy Green, "Hitherto many SMEs have been reluctant to consider mobile-only strategy for telephone extensions, because they've been concerned that the functionality of existing PBX add-ons and hosted platforms didn't offer them the controls and tools that they needed. New developments in this market mean that mobile-only strategy is worth a second look."

SipXecs is a stable and scalable voice over IP (VoIP) open source system built for enterprise users. Based entirely on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard, sipXecs brings an extensive feature set to OnRelay MBX, including active directory integration, presence and Microsoft exchange support. SipXecs uses internet techniques and a distributed architecture to ensure a highly secure IP voice system.

OnRelay's Hosted MBX with sipXecs is targeted particularly well to the next generation of telecom providers. In lowering the cost of entry, it allows innovative players to host enterprise-class telephony for the SME market.


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