By Khali Henderson

IP desktop phone maker snom technology announced Wednesday that its now in the IP PBX business in North America with the debut of its first IP PBX line, snom ONE, for small and medium businesses.

The move, a logical one for the device maker looking to sell more of its IP and DECT phones to businesses, was jumpstarted by the summer merger of snom with PBXnSIP, a sister company also formed by snom founder, Dr. Christian Stredicke. The two companies operated side by side for the past seven years.

The combined development teams worked together on the snom ONE launch with a goal of enhancing features to make them plug and play with snom phones, said Mike Storella, snoms director of business development.

Storella said the resulting offer was in response to a need in the market for a feature-rich IP PBX that was affordable for small and medium sized businesses with 150 employees or fewer but with many locations.

snom ONE works with standard servers and comes in three versions: snom ONE free for up to 10 extensions, snom ONE yellow for up to 20 extensions and snom ONE blue for an unlimited number of extensions.  Snom ONE free is available at no charged and can be downloaded at www.snom.com/snomone while yellow and blue are $895 and $1,495 respectively.

All snom ONE versions offer the full feature set, including hunt and ACD groups, mailbox, auto attendant, conference rooms, paging, simultaneous ringing of desktop and cell phone, multiple extension aliases, centralized address book, hot desking, voice mail, shared-line emulation and a web interface for provisioning and management.

snom ONE blue also allows up to five separate corporate tenants, supporting multiple organizations to operate using a single IP PBX. Storella explained that oftentimes small business owners operate several businesses with shared office space and telephone systems. This enables each company to maintain a separate identity.

Going forward, Storella said snom has an opportunity to enhance the operation of its phones with the IP PBX software by, for example, taking advantage of the touch screen on the 870 or the unique automatic call record button. Snoms phone line includes the 300 series low-wattage, green” phones; the 800 series with color displays, USB and GigE ports; the M3 DECT cordless; PA1 paging system; and Meeting Point conference phone.

snom ONE is compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac environments and is equipped with web security through HTTPS and call security through TLS and SRTP. It supports mixed IPv4/IPv6 LAN and WAN environments and comes with an automatic blacklisting feature that makes it possible to expose public IP addresses.

snom ONE software will be available in North America through snoms distributors and VARs later this month. The IP PBX was released to distribution channels in Europe on Oct. 5.

snom distributes its hardware through its network of more than 200 authorized reseller partners in 60 countries worldwide. In North America, snom gear is distributed by ABP Tech, Novius, SoTel, Interlink, Vital Communications, D&H Distributing, SYNNEX, GenTech, Norelco and TeleDynamics.

Storella said the IP PBX will offer the same margins as snom phones, but he would not disclose the amount.  He acknowledged that there is no margin on the free download, but said it offers VARs serving smaller businesses a compelling and affordable package with snom phones and an off-the-shelf server.