ITEXPO

Gary Audin shares his insights on the future of technology

Does the cloud have challenges you should be aware of? Is IoT the future? If so, how should carriers react? Weill WebRTC change how companies communicate internally?

Cisco quietly let go 50 engineers and other people responsible for their low-cost SPA line of desktop IP phones (SPA300, SPA500, etc.) - I believe back in November. The IP phones targeted the SMB and I'm told it's a $600 million business for Cisco that Cisco just decided to let go to focus on the "enterprise". Must be nice to say no to $600 million! They're still selling the SPA line of products (and may even still be manufacturing them), but there is no more development on the SPA line of IP phones.

HiperPBX's Gustavo Scheveloff, Sales Director gave me an introduction of HiperPBX at ITEXPO Miami 2014. Their solution is unique in that it's a VoIP PBX that not only features Unified Communications (UC), but it also sports some interesting M2M features. They have developed a software industrial module and defined a new concept - "Industrial Unified Communications", which leverages M2M.

It leverages mobile TCP & SNMP for monitoring devices, routers, switches and can send SMS, make a phone call or send an email if a machine has an error. In industrial environments it can be useful to monitor high temperature, humidity, switch not responding, machine under heavy load.

At AstriCon, Xorcom today released a new hybrid (VoIP + PSTN) telephony solution called the CXE4000 featuring Xorcom's CompletePBX distro (based on Asterisk and FreePBX). The CXE4000 is a heavy-duty, stand-alone, pre-configured, out-of-the-box IP PBX It is optimized for businesses with extremely high call volumes and / or additional communication applications.

At the last ITEXPO in Las Vegas I spoke with Xorcom's Ruth Bridger who talked about their CompletePBX solution, which is based on Asterisk and FreePBX with Xorcom's secret sauce added in. I recall her mentioning how they use USB to add scalability and redundancy to their product line. Indeed, the new CXE4000 supports various combinations of telephony ports via Astribank units connected via USB2: up to 960 PSTN/analog phones ports, up to 24 E1 R2 / T1 CAS PRI ports, up to 1500 users and up to 750 concurrent calls.