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Fonality Acquires Trixbox
An anonymous reader writes "MySQL's Brian Aker has a good commentary on the big news in acquisitions today that Fonality has acquired Trixbox, the Linux Telephony distribution." From the article: "So why is this big news? Trixbox is the distribution for telephony on Linux today. They have put together a vertical Linux distribution dedicated to telephony. It combines Asterisk with a web based interface backed by MySQL, integrated into the SugarCRM solution. As Redhat today is the LAMP of the IT Enterprise and Web Framework, (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP), Trixbox is the LAMP stack of the Telephony market, Linux , Asterisk, MySQL, Perl/PHP."
Trixbox was the next iteration of the Asterisk@Home ISO which is a fantastic, super easy to install instant PBX for home or work. For a $30 dollar special modem card (an FXO) and a slightly old PC, you can quickly have a full fledged PBX system up and running in about 20 minutes. It has all the modules you could need to do even fancy PBX configurations built in. This is a huge deal. This is something that could finally get those scam artists at places like Avaya to stop charging exorbitant prices for 30 year old technology (not to mention the yearly licensing etc). This set of tools could save a company tons and tons of money by helping them move to a much more inexpensive solution. If you are interested in OSS and phones you should learn more
Are you seriously looking at this or just looking to flame? The real story is that software we can download (either Trixbox or just CentOS, Asterisk and FreePBX) and install on a standard PC that will function better then $100,000.00+ system from Nortel that costs maybe $5000.00 plus phones. At my day job we have a $600,000.00 Nortel with about another 150K of hardware in the system. It is going to be replaced with an Asterisk based system over the next few years. Maybe a Fonality Box or a Digium Appliance? Possibly one of those with something of my own making attached via IAX2 trunking. At any rate it will be a system that rivals the current offerings by just about everyone. At a much lower cost.
Not to mention the sheer geekiness of Trixbox. It makes a killer home hack. You can control X10 from your phone. Tie your doorbell in as an extension and answer the door with your phone using hardware from home base. On and on.
On my home business, if I don't answer, the user gets the option of trying my cell phone or go to voice mail. If I don't answer the cell then Trixbox takes over and goes to internal voicemail which is then emailed to me. Makes the cell phone usable without giving anyone my cell number.
Thing is that we all use phones and there is a major shift underway with regards to what with and how we use voice communications. Very exiting on a lot of levels.
Robert