Recently, we interviewed Ruth Bridger, Xorcom’s VP of Marketing to learn a little more about Xorcom and their TwinStar appliance in particular.  Xorcom is a privately-held IP-PBX and Asterisk Hardware manufacturer that harnesses Asterisk® Open Source IP-PBX to design and produce leading-edge hardware telephony solutions for commercial installations.

The following is a summary of our conversation or listen to the podcast to hear the full interview.

1) [VoIPon] So, Ruth, recently we’ve interviewed a number of vendors such as Digium, Foncordiax, 3cx and Pika, and they are all offering what they consider to be the best PBX solution on the market, how does Xorcom and the TwinStar in particular, stand out from the rest of the competition?

[Ruth Bridger, Xorcom VP Marketing] First of all, Xorcom systems offer hybrid support. That is to say, they support both PSTN and VoIP traffic on a single PBX. This means that Xorcom systems can integrate into existing telephony environments to provide the added benefit of VoIP, or completely replace an existing PSTN-based system to provide all of the telephony for an organization while allowing the customer to maintain the existing infrastructure – wiring and handsets alike. Second of all, our systems are modular and scalable, so they can grow with the organization. Our IP-PBX line supports from 50 up to 1000 users. Also, because our systems are open, they integrate easily with 3rd party applications. For example, many of our partners integrate their software on our hardware platform to provide a bundled solution for contact centers and telemarketing operations. And last but not least, we have the only complete failover solution in the market for Asterisk-based PBX, including servers, telephony interfaces, and IP phones.  It’s called TwinStar, and it is unique in this aspect because it is based on our XPP architecture, in which the telephony interfaces are external to the Asterisk server, and therefore not server-dependent in case of server failure.

2)      [VoIPon] So what sort of failover events might the TwinStar catch? Is there any type of failover that it won’t catch?

[RB] TwinStar is programmed to detect any server-based issue, such as faulty power supply, hardware component, software error, disconnected cable, etc. What it will not catch is something like a complete power outage, for example. This is something that the integrator would have to protect using some other method such as a UPS or generator.

3)      [VoIPon] What type of organization do you think would be the best candidate to purchase such an appliance?

[RB] Due to the flexibility and modularity of our systems, which I just mentioned, we see a wide range of customers: from small lawyers’ offices to multi-billion dollar international corporations with dozens of remote sites.  I would say that the sweet spot is organizations with between 50 and 500 users. If we’re talking about vertical markets, we notice that hospitality is a great match. Many hotels have existing telephony infrastructure supporting hundreds of FXS lines. If they want to integrate their voice and data networks, Xorcom’s high density systems, which can support almost 700 FXS lines in a single configuration, are a great choice.

4) [VoIPon] From your perspective where do you see the future of the Open Source Telephony market going?

[RB] The Open Source telephony market is definitely growing rapidly.  Recent research by Eastern Management Group shows that it grew 30% worldwide in the first half of 2009, while the traditional PBX market more or less stagnated.  Don’t you think the Open Source telephony market share is quite large, considering the short time it’s been available? We see it growing across all industries and for all system sizes. I wouldn’t be surprised if open source starts to constitute the majority of new telephony implementations in a very short time.

5)      [VoIPon] What more might VoIPon’s listeners see out of Xorcom in the near future?
[RB] Oh – we have quite a lot going on right now! Much of our development activity centers around building reliability into open source telephony. We’ll soon present new products which optimize power management for larger implementations by using a redundant power supply feature for the telephony interfaces. We’ll also launch a high density PRI unit, improved models of our medium and high-end PBX lines, and announce integration with some hot new technologies. All of these endeavors will be discussed and demonstrated next month at the IT Expo in Miami, Florida.

Broadcasting from various countries around the world, using Voice over IP Technology, this is VoIP Uncovered—a VoIPon Solutions UK Podcast.  Representing VoIPon, I’m Kathleen Reed.

Today, we’re speaking with Serge Forest, Sangoma’s new Vice President of Marketing. Thanks for joining us today, Serge.

It’s been an interesting year for Sangoma. In addition to providing its traditional voice and data PSTN connectivity, it ramped up its contact centre building blocks, which became part of its portfolio following the acquisition of Paraxip in July 2008. As a result there have been a lot of changes. We’re excited to take this opportunity to bring VoIPon’s listeners up to speed as to what’s happening at Sangoma and what we might expect from them in the future.

[VoIPon] So Serge, what would you say has been the most significant development at Sangoma in 2009?

[Serge Forest, VP Marketing, Sangoma] Well, certainly we can see advancements on three major fronts. First on the product side we’ve launched award winning NetBorder Express Gateway 2.0 both on Windows and Linux. We’ve launched a series of hybrid telephony cards, which are unique in the industry [and they] allow [you] to mix analogue and digital telephony interfaces on a single card—very popular in the IP PBX market. And we’ve delivered clustering solutions for our SS7 software, so that’s on the product front.

On the PBX market side, we’ve had a terrific year, announcing many new application partners, the Aastra 800 system is now compatible with Sangoma. There’s CudaTel, a subsidiary of Barracuda Networks, pbxnsip, Foncordiax, Dialexia, Brekeke…a number of new PBX applications, we’re thrilled, and some movement on the Windows UC space that will bear fruit in 2010.

And finally, the third point, the contact centre business, as you’ve discussed. We’ve leveraged the Paraxip portfolio and we’ve gained many landmark customers, including some that are that are running open source, through our partner Vicidial, but also through our traditional Paraxip channel, we’ve announced Teleperformance recently, the largest outsourced customer service company in the world, has standardized on Netborder.

[VoIPon] Great, so how has this been received by your channel partners?

[SF] Well, in general the channel partners have really benefited from Sangoma offering a wider spectrum of products, and a wider number of applications that they can sell.

Let me take an example, so Foncordiax, for instance, out of Europe, has selected Sangoma to design a set of PBX appliances and has started rolling them out this year, and a number of channel partners, including VoIPon and VoIPon’s channel, have adopted this solution as well. So we’re really thrilled about the fact that a number of applications have been standardizing on Sangoma and the channels are picking them up and reselling them.

[VoIPon] What are some of the major “case study” style successes of the year in terms of where and how Sangoma technology has been implemented around the world? Are there particular stories VoIPon’s listeners can learn from?

[SF] Well, we’ve really been impressed in 2009 with the scope of certain successes that really show the maturity of the technology. For instance, we had, over the last year, or eighteen months, a 50,000 SIP endpoint deployment in Portugal in the education system. That’s very, very impressive, no matter what the technology is, but it’s also based on some open source projects and some Sangoma hardware, so very exciting. We’ve also had a number of people using open source as a platform to shrink wrap their commercial product around and deploy some very impressive solutions. For instance, our partner Digivox in Brazil has deployed 6000 IVR ports at Banco do Brasil, so very impressive. And finally, right here in the UK, one of the top wireless carriers has rolled out NetBorder in production in 2009, so very exciting.

[VoIPon] What other changes and new developments at Sangoma do you see coming for 2010?

[SF] Sangoma’s mission is really to make software based communications applications run more efficiently and more cost effectively. So, in 2010, we’ll see more activities and more events to drive that mission forward. So, on the product side look for significant new releases on the NetBorder product line, emphasis on international features, performance, security, and interoperability with all sorts of new applications. Also look for new products to be released to address some IP only configurations.

On the Sales and Marketing side, certainly 2010 promises to be a very exciting year for our partners in the contact centre, unified communications, and open source space, so look for several announcements and events throughout the year.

[VoIPon] What trends have you noticed recently in the telephony market and how do you see these playing out in the future?

[SF] We’ve seen really the open source telephony market mature, extensively over the recent past, both in the scale of the solutions that are being deployed, but also by the number of commercial offerings that have open source underneath as a base platform, so really glad to see that market taking maturity, and taking it to the next level, so we can see more of the same in the coming years.

We’ve also seen that the community and the industry alike have started to embrace FreeSWITCH, as a viable alternative to projects based on Asterisk. Open Source Telephony was largely Asterisk-based, up until recently, but FreeSWITCH is really taking on, now with Baracuda networks sponsoring it, and offering a very attractive alternative, so we’ve seen that as well.

And finally we’ve seen advances in the unified communication, Windows based PBX with 3CX, pbxnsip, and Microsoft having very, very solid solutions for both the small enterprise and for the Fortune 500 from the Microsoft perspective, with Office Communication Server, and we see those as having very good potential to replace legacy systems that are hardware based.

Last Friday we had the opportunity to speak with Mark Trowbridge, CEO of Foncordiax, an interesting company that seems ready to take the retail world by storm with its new, off the shelf plug n’ go range of appliances that pretty much anyone can sell and any customer can setup and get going without a whole lot of intervention.

The product is set to launch this Wednesday.  Listen to the podcast or read the summary below. If you’re running a small business, this is really interesting stuff.

[VoIPon] We understand that this product is going to be targeted at some specific vertical markets and this is supposed to be a very easy product to set up and get going. Can you walk us through a simple setup?

[Mark Trowbridge, CEO of Foncordiax] Yeah, I guess you’re talking about our new retail product, uh, which we devised really couple of months ago and we’re launching this Wednesday coming, the 18^th of November.

So we spent quite a few months looking the hardware the branding the point of sale, and in particular the installation and configuration, really to ensure that retail outlets need little or no technical knowledge.

The first thing, I’d like to mention is that Foncordiax is a phone system. It’s not a PC converted into a phone system. Actually, we’ve started from the ground up and actually built the hardware centered on making it into a phone system.  So you won’t actually find the normal  connectors that you’d find on the back of a PC, you’ll just find the connectors that are there for the telephony, which means the end user is not getting confused as to where to put cables, plugs and things of that nature.

Then we took really the KISS approach, the keep it simple approach to configuration and worked on the basis that it’s easier to change something than it is to create something. That is to say we’ve actually built all the systems preconfigured to something that will probably suit 80% of clients. And then those that want to make amendments and changes can do. So, when they’ve actually unpacked the system it’s really ready to go, once they’ve plugged all the connections in.

So in essence, they’ve received the unit. Unpack it.  Plug in the connectors. Plug in a handset. Go around to the PC if they want to make any changes. But generally they can just pick up a VoIP Phone and start making calls.

[VoIPon] In a recent news release, you announced that you would be integrating Sangoma boards into all of your appliances.  Why should this be important for your customers?

[MT] Oh, really, really important! Over the last two years, we’ve used many components inside our systems, and they’re all good, there is nothing wrong with them, but Sangoma are a very special company. They’ve, we’ve tried to engineer a system that is the Royals Royce of IP PBXs. And Sangoma fit our ethos in terms of quality and in terms of backup and support.

You know, we haven’t had one Sangoma card go wrong on us in all the time we’ve installed them. And in terms of product development, they’re just streets ahead of anyone else, and at the end of the day they are a really nice bunch of guys to deal with. So they fit really nicely in with our model of trying to create top-notch product and reliable product that the consumer can you know, be satisfied will work for years to come.

[VoIPon] For VoIPon’s listener’s who are more involved in the telephony space, I think they’d like to know what’s running under the hood. Rumour has it that it’s basically Free PBX. But is it more? If so, what makes it different?

[MT] Yeah, it’s FreePBX. Fabulous operating system, if you like.  It’s got some tweaks in it, some things that we’ve done and made some changes.

It’s a branded version of FreePBX.

But what I want to touch on is a phone system is much more than just the components within it. I used to build software solutions for companies based on SQL server and MS Access, which were both solid reliable systems and we’d charge a lot of money to end users for bespoke systems that they were very happy with.  So taking FreePBX is really no different.

Joe Roper, the company’s CTO, likens it to baking a cake. You all can start with the same ingredients but some end up as flat pancakes. I like that analogy, because you know we have seen some dreadful end user appliances using FreePBX.

But moving on from that, I’d like to take that analogy a little further. Let’s say you do make good cakes, but now you want to start selling those cakes down at the local market. This starts to involve making them to a particular design, buying in more ingredients in quantity. Obviously there are financial restrictions and constraints on that: there is storage, transport, and more of your time.

Let’s take it a bit further, let’s say you want to sell it into local shops. There is pricing. There is packaging. Perhaps even bigger cookers are needed and perhaps a bigger kitchen and potentially some staff.

Now, let’s say someone in Australia wants to sell your cakes. You’re now into the realms of more staff, more stock, more accountancy and a whole host of other things that come into play.

Whilst FreePBX is under the hood, that doesn’t make the Foncordiax—the Foncordiax is made up a multitude of components and parts and people that turn it into a very robust, very reliable, very solid phone system that is going to be here for years to come.

[VoIPon ]What else might we expect to see from Foncordiax in the future? Are there any interesting products in the pipeline you’d like to share with VoIPon’s VoIP uncovered listeners?

[MT] Yeah, there’s actually loads! We’ve come up with our new range, which as I say is launching next week, which we think is going to excite the market place.

We’re not necessarily going after or attacking or approaching the open source sector. There is a lot of product already out there that fits that niche—some great open source software, PBX in a Flash and trixbox. And, there is equipment out there—Rhino for example, has a very good piece of equipment.

So, in terms of your listeners that are in the open source sector, we’re not looking to ‘steal the march’ on you or take any of your market away.

We’re really trying to get into the proprietary market place. And that’s really where we want to be with the Foncordiax as a brand.

So outside of our standard product range, which will suit many a business, we’re looking at some of the vertical markets.

We’ve got a fabulous new product, which is based on business centres and any sectors that have multi-tenant scenarios. And we’ll be launching that, looking at our marketing people, we’ll probably launch that around February or March of next year. But that will come complete with individual PBXs, billing platforms, and connectivity through Sangoma again and it will be just a fabulous product.

Other things that we’re going to be introducing into the Foncordiax itself: one of our distributors has requested that we build in video conferencing, so we’re looking at that. And that should be coming out I guess, January or February, we’ll have that as a module inside Foncordiax.

So lots to come!

[VoIPon] Do you have any predictions for the future of the telephony market in general and the future of the plug n’go type appliance?

[MT] Yeah, I think we kind of stumbled into the Plug n’go, really because we had a product that does install very, very, easily, so it’s a natural progression into that market place and really into the retail arena.

But, I’ve been looking at it long and hard, but when you think back thirty thirty-five years ago, when we used to buy PCs. There was a day when you’d buy your PC from a computer company, rather than a local shop.

And then good old Microsoft invented Windows, and it really opened up the whole market place in terms of being able to buy a PC from a local store, bring it home, connect it, and start playing with it.

And, I guess that’s what I’m seeing, or I feel we’re going to see in terms of phone systems.

We’re going to see phone systems being available, more readily available, even potentially via eBay, take it home, unpack it, plug it in and start working.

Um, and I think there will be an evolution of industries coming off the back of that in terms of support and integration with things like CRM packages and recording and video conferencing, and a whole host of things.

The same way the PC model has gone, there is no reason the phone industry shouldn’t go down exactly the same road.

I guess, we’re quite proud of the fact that we’re first to go out market with a true retail version.

And we’ll be interested to see over the coming months how that’s picked up, and how other companies get involved in that market sector as well.

This means that a Foncordiax system can be taken off the shelf, unpacked, plugged in, switched on and making and receiving calls in minutes and only with minimal experience. The company explains in a recent newsletter, “If you can plug a computer into a network, you’ve got enough experience!”

The company tells us that not only are the new Foncordiax Control Units easy to install and set up, but they come with the Foncordiax PBX software, which provides “everything a business will ever need from its phone system” including voice mail and music on hold to call forwarding, conferencing and call recording.

The Foncordiax Control unit has been completely re-engineered and the range now comprises just three units; ‘SoHo’ (Ideal small/remote office system), ‘Office’ which can connect to any existing lines and handle over 120 concurrent calls and ‘Corporate’ with built in redundancy and components to suit specific businesses.

This past June, Foniatec also announced that Sangoma’s premium voice cards now power all telephony interfaces for Foncordiax PBX appliances.

This combination should prove to be an interesting solution for businesses in search of an easy-to-use PBX.