Fonality, which specializes in open source phone systems, is answering the U.S. Gulf Coast’s call for help following Hurricane Ike. Fonality CEO Chris Lyman (pictured) had a rather intriguing disaster recovery idea following a chat with The VAR Guy. Here’s the scoop.
On Sept. 16, The VAR Guy and Fonality’s Lyman were discussing Ike’s business impact across the Gulf Coast. By Sept. 17, Lyman was back online with a special offer. In an email to The VAR Guy, Lyman wrote:
“My talk with you spurned a cool idea. I decided to provide a free replacement server for all of our customers affected by Ike. We are sending them free servers, free shipping, and spending a free hour sending their backup configuration from our data center to their new onsite server. Cool, eh?”
Yes. Very cool, Chris. The VAR Guy doesn’t know how many free servers Fonality will need to ship. But it’s a refreshing approach to business recovery.
Background, Please
As regular readers of this blog know, Fonality got its start leveraging the Asterisk open source PBX. But Fonality’s own developers have written thousands of lines of enhanced code, meaning that Fonality’s performance is less and less related to Asterisk, and more and more tied to Fonality’s own R&D.
Fonality has attracted some big-name partners, including investments from Intel Capital, and a reseller relationship involving Dell.
Fast Recovery?
As Fonality helps its Gulf Coast business customers regain their dial-tones, Lyman is quick to articulate how a HybridHosted business model can speed business recovery efforts.
Asserts Lyman:
“Our HybridHosted keeps a copy of our customers phone configuration at our data center. This means that each time they make a change to their local Fonality phone system (like adding an extension or changing their auto attendant) we store it in our remote data center.
This makes disaster recovery for a scenario like Hurricane Ike a breeze. We simply send the customer a brand new server with their last configuration pre-loaded onto it. All they have to do is plug it in and then re-record their personal greetings (we don’t backup any audio files in order to respect privacy of our customers).”
Sounds simple enough. But there’s another twist. In addition to disrupting the traditional PBX market, Lyman insists Fonality can increasingly disrupt IP PBXes from Avaya, Cisco and Nortel.
In fact, Lyman is more than happy to take a jab at those rivals.
Says Lyman:
The [Fonality] solution lives at the customer premise but we “partially hosted” key pieces of it for redundancy. As I am sure you are aware, most people don’t back up their data let alone their phone system. And, because all the big iron dinosaurs like Cisco, Nortel, and Avaya (and even the new players like Microsoft) are 100% premise-based they don’t have the ability to replace your phone system in the event of a disaster.
Clearly, Lyman has talent: He’s driven to help customers across the Gulf Coast, but he’s happy to throw rivals under the bus during the road trip.
Tags: Asterisk | Chris Lyman | Fonality | Hosted VoIP | open source PBX | Software as a Service
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This is one of the main reasons that Dell has chosen Fonality to partner with, their forward thinking ability as well as having an amazing platform for our small and medium business customers gives us an advantage that no one can match.
While the VARGuy doesn’t know how many free servers Fonality are committing themselves to ship, I’m sure that Fonality do.
On that basis the balance of the potential free publicity and positive community image versus the bottom line cost of the free kit and resouce being supplied is sure to be firmly in Fonality’s favour.
That said Fonality need all the positive community image they can get. This made me smile:
“But Fonality’s own developers have written thousands of lines of enhanced code, meaning that Fonality’s performance is less and less related to Asterisk, and more and more tied to Fonality’s own R&D.”
How much has been contributed back to Asterisk and other FOSS projects such as FreePBX on which Fonality depend? Not much if any.
Nice concept to help out the Gulf Coast victims but I hope they read there ToS and make sure they are not agreeing to a long term contract with maintenance fees. I know they are trying to help but as a for profit business I have to be skeptical that they would give this away for free without anyway of re-couping the expense. As for Fonality, in my opinion they has taken from the Asterisk community and gave not given back and have done alot of work to distance them self from Asterisk so people this is there product that they developed all by them selves. The bought a open-source project called Trixbox that they used as their base platform. I am not a fan of this approach and it goes against what open source is all about. I am also not happy with the direction Digium/Asterisk is taking with SwitchVox either, I think they both are missing the point in their own way but of course many people will read this and think I am wrong at least about Digium. I don’t like the way SwitchVox has their licensing setup where you have to pay a large amount extra for the GUI and updates on a per seat basis and you even have to pay to provision a Polycom IP Phone but then they don’t give you root access to the server to do it yourself. It seems like everyone want to make their platform a “Me Too” product so when they are compared to Cisco they can go “me too” on whatever they have to offer when being disruptive, feature rich, reliable, expandable without extra cost is what the customer wants. .03
-Dal
AsteriskVoIPNews.com
How do these people get jobs, let alone become CEOs?
SPURN
Pronunciation: \?sp?rn\
transitive verb
1: to tread sharply or heavily upon : trample
2: to reject with disdain or contempt : scorn
Illiterati: Um, they become CEOs because they take risks, launch their own businesses, and then build those businesses. You may not agree with the business strategy, but Fonality seems to be succeeding…