3Com is actively expanding its product offerings by launching new products to cater to all businesses from small businesses to businesses with about 200 users. The three new voice products the company has added to its product listing includes two new VCX Connect models plus the 3Com Asterisk Appliance.

The 3Com Asterisk Appliance is a self-contained unit that is based on Digium’s Asterisk Appliance. It is, of course, an open source system an is designed for small businesses with only 5 to 30 phone users. Being a self-contained unit the ease of setting it up is remarkable allowing users to simply plug-and-play. 3Com Asterisk works on all of 3Com’s phone handsets. Support and service is no problem since 3Com offers full service, warranty and support for it. The list price of the 3Com Asterisk is $1,595 at present.

The release of 3Com Asterisk Appliance is a strategic decision for 3Com as they emerge from their relative non-activity in the voice space. Right now it is the company’s aim to focus on “delivering products and solutions for converged secure networks, in which voice is an application that can be readily integrated with many others.” This makes the decision to use Asterisk a sound one since, as 3Com’s senior vice president and general manager, Bob Dechant, said they chose to work with Digium because of its “position as the Asterisk leader [and] its commitment to open standards and the ease-of-use of the appliance.”

Digium, on the other hand, is still assertively marketing their product and despite all the big news surrounding it lately (Read: The awards and the acquisition of Switchvox) the Digium team continues to be enthusiastic about each new appliance that makes use of Asterisk. As Bill Miller, Digium’s vice president of product management and marketing, said, “Digium pioneered Asterisk and is now working to bring the software’s power and rich feature set to a broader array of customers. 3Com’s selection of our new appliance to offer to its own customers validates our strategy of opening new markets to Asterisk by making it user-friendly, and is also testament to the fact that Digium’s products are the gold standard in the Asterisk ecosystem today.”

Don't miss a post! Subscribe to the RSS feed or by email today!