VoIP News has a feature on the two top enterprise-grade providers of Asterisk-based VoIP solutions. True enough, while many businesses are looking into cost-savings and solid performance of Asterisk, not everyone wants the trouble of having to install everything themselves. And not everyone wants the headache of troubleshooting when problems arise, and just relying on community comments and forums to fix things.

While the free, open-source version of Asterisk is still gaining plenty of notice – downloads are running at over 1,000 a day at the asterisk.org site – not everyone wants to roll their own IP PBX, and it’s those users that Asterisk vendors hope to attract with all-in-one premium packages.

Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality (creator of trixbox) attributes much of his company’s business to being “Asterisk rescuers” to businesses who “download Asterisk, buy a bunch of phones and then run into a brick wall.” He also says most of the company’s corporate clients aren’t even aware that Asterisk is the engine that powers Fonality’s PBXtra solutions.

Fonality sells PBXtra, which is an all-in-one server (hardware and software) package designed for companies with up to 500 employees or seats. It comes in Standard editions, which retail for $1,000 and the call center edition, which retails for $2,995 up.

Digium, meanwhile, which is Fonality’s main competitor, sees itself as focusing on larger enterprises, as compared to Fonality’s up-to-500 seats only offerings.

Also, Digium and Fonality approach VoIP from different perspectives. Digium packages a version of Asterisk directly based on the open-source version. Digium then does its own bug-testing and provides warranties and support to its buyers. Digium also sells the Asterisk Business Edition, which comes with an Asterisk commercial license, which means that, unlike the open source license, users are entitled not to release the source code of any modifications to the public.

While Fonality’s PBXtra is also based on Asterisk, Fonality’s engineers have reworked the code from ground up to eliminate upfront any problems associated with the original code, including difficulty in scalability. In fact, “now there are more lines of Fonality code in PBXtra than there are of the original Asterisk code.” Fonality has also added its own features, like the GUI Heads-UP module, that gives users and administrators one-click access to most of PBXtra’s features. It also includes a secure chat functionality.

The market for Asterisk, compared to the VoIP industry at-large, is still considered small. Fonality, for instance, has only about 50,000 phone users spread across 2,000 sites globally. Just under 80 million calls come through its systems. However, what’s big is that business for both Fonality and Digium have tripled through the past year. They still see demand growing, as businesses shift rom traditional to VoIP-based telephony systems.

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