Cloud unified communications (UC) vendor Fonality has appointed former Microsoft executive David Scult as its new CEO — the third CEO in two years. What’s the deal with the revolving door, and where might a Scult-lead Fonality be headed? The VAR Guy always has a few ideas …
Turn the wayback machine to 2010, when our resident blogger outlined Fonality’s transition of both its focus — from open source PBX to the cloud — and CEO — from founder Chris Lyman to Brocade vet Dean Mansfield. Now that Fonality has solidified into a cloud-based UC company, it’s time to take things to the next level. David Scult, who once managed Microsoft’s Office 365 global distribution, now will be overseeing Fonality’s strategic direction, which likely will include a strong focus on expanding Fonality’s reach in the global marketplace. The company also is banking on Scult’s past experience with “entrepreneurial ventures” to help it expand its reach in the UC space.
Absent is any information on Dean Mansfield’s leaving. Interestingly, his name doesn’t even appear in the release. A quick Google search turned up nothing for The VAR Guy, and as of this writing, our resident blogger hasn’t yet heard back from Fonality’s PR team for an official comment. But The VAR Guy will continue to keep tabs on Fonality and the latest new CEO appointments for 2012.
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UPDATE: We’ve received this official statement on Dean Mansfield:
” Dean departed Fonality as CEO last year to pursue other interests. Moving forward, Fonality is expanding its focus to strengthen both the channel program and direct sales initiative simultaneously. This shift in philosophy is ideally suited to David’s skill set and is a natural transition. Fonality will capitalize on David’s dynamic experience and thought leadership from both large enterprises and entrepreneurial endeavors as the company solidifies a broader, agnostic family of solutions encompassing both cloud and hybrid-hosted offerings. The board is excited about these new market opportunities and strategy for 2012 and beyond. “
Looking at the impact the Microsoft-Nokia deal had on Nokia (bye bye anything to do with Linux and F/OSS), with a Microsoft guy in charge I’m wondering what will happen to Fonality’s Linux/Asterisk & F/OSS based products. Luckily Fonality’s PR statement gives a hint with the use of the word “agnostic”. Wonder how long it will take before TVG will report about Fonality hooking up with Microsoft and trixbox disappearing into thin air.
Anyway it may all be moot. Like TVG I did my fair share of Googling to see what happened with Dean Mansfield and came up empty too. But I did come across quite a few postings that expressed shall we say a certain unhappiness with Fonality. Personally I do not have a similar experience with Fonality but it’s always good to know what can (and did) go wrong. Have a look for yourself and Google for “Fonality s*cks”. With nearly 40,000 hits I think the new CEO has some fixing to do before marrying Fonality to Lync.
I did a similar search when I was looking for a system for our business. Fonality had 38k, RingCentral 22k and Vocalocity 7k. We ended up going with Vocalocity at first, but ended up switching to Fonality. After all of this I realized the reason they had some many hits to Fonality s*cks was b/c their trixbox forum of over a million users filters into the search results.