Fonality Updates Hybrid Hosted VoIP For SMBs

Internet telephony is a potentially huge market for cloud VARs – after all, not only can you sell the service, there’s an on-premise hardware upsell opportunity, too. Fonality is taking that a step further with the update of the 2011 version of their hybrid-hosted IP-PBX solution. It’s seeks to provide SMBs with the reliability of on-premises VoIP with the flexibility and cost savings of the cloud. Better yet, they’re only making the so-called Fonality trixbox Pro 5.2 solution only available to their reseller partners.

Like competing offerings from providers like Intermedia, Fonality’s hosted PBX offers a unified communications (UC) dashboard that grants access to enterprise features like click-to-call, secure instant messaging, visual call parking, and real-time presence updates. The difference is that they also use an on-premise appliance to enable higher reliability and performance.

While Fonality’s press release shies away from describing what’s new in this release and what they’ve had since last year’s cloud refocusing, their website has the skinny:

• User-based licensing, allowing a single enduser to have as many as four extensions for no additional cost. Moving away from charging per extension also gives IT managers better insight into usage.
• The Fonality HUD dashboard now enables multiple VoIP servers to connect, such that an organization with geographically discrete offices can keep that floating presence going wherever they might be.
• Voice quality monitoring by way of the new Fonality FONscore, allowing administrators to drill down and see any device’s metrics.
• Support for multi-core and multi-threaded processors.
• Better support for for call centers SLAs thanks to new external reporting metrics like time to answer and average call length.
• Group permissions to keep certain employees from, say, dialing internationally.

On paper, an SMB-focused reseller-enabled VoIP solution sounds good. But Intermedia had to step away from their proprietary platform and back into the Microsoft ecosystem to gain traction for their UC. Is there room for an original VoIP solution?

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