Dell will announce today that Fonality has been chosen to offer VoIP phone systems to Dell customers that are small and medium-sized businesses.
Dell-Fonality SMB VoIP Phone System Diagram
 During a Brad Reese on Cisco conference call Chris Lyman - CEO of Fonality stated:
"Cisco’s pricing and features aren’t built for the small business market." "They are too expensive and too complicated to deploy." "Given that 49% of the world’s businesses have between 5-100 employees (source: IDC), this is a huge sector to overlook." |
"Cisco is a bad bet for your phone system."
"They lock you into their proprietary routers and phones, holding the business owner hostage."
"Part of why Fonality has done so well, besides being half the cost, is that we use standard phones from Polycom and Aastra and standard servers from Dell. Fonality is a leader in open source telephony. We have customers in 100 countries."
"Open source means customers have lower prices and more control."
"Cisco cannot offer either of these."
View the Fonality Head's Up Display Interactive Demo
Fonality's Heads Up Display makes it easy to see who's calling with interactive desktop alerts, check the status of any employee, and initiate internal calls, mobile calls and secure the chat sessions, all from the desktop.
View Fonality Tutorials - User Control Panel
Fonality User Control Panel - provides users total control with on-screen voicemail, employee directory, click-to-call, call logs, call forwarding and much more!
How concerned should Cisco be about today's SMB VoIP partnership announcement between Dell and Fonality?
And do you agree with Fonality CEO Chris Lyman that Cisco is a bad bet for your phone system?
Related Stories:
| Network World | Cisco: Look Out Below (for Dell and Open Source) |
| Network World | Asterisk is no longer just a PBX footnote |
| Network World | Asterisk plans higher-spec IP PBX, snaps at Cisco's heels |
About Brad Reese on Cisco
Brad Reese is research manager at BradReese.Com, advancing the careers of 1 million certified individuals in the growing Cisco Career Certification Program.
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Asterisk kicks Cisco's arse
I don't see why Asterisk would be any easier for a SMB than Cisco solutions. Cheaper maybe, but not easier.
I think the "open" systems all suffer from interoperabilty issues, at least until SIP specifies the higher lever application functions and not just basic call control.
The reality that I see from our smaller customers is that they know next to nothing about phone systems, and they don't want to know the nuts and bolts - they just want it to work.
I am sure there are technically inclined customers that successfully implement an Asterisk packaged system. These are the same folks that could implement a small key system or hybrid on their own as well.
Businesses don't buy Cisco because it is cheaper, they buy it because it has a good reputation in the industry, and there are numerous resellers available to sell, install, and service the systems. Same for Nortel, Siemens, Mitel, etc.
Those that are not risk averse will go with "second tier" systems to save money. Nothing wrong with that as long as you know what you are getting into.
Full Disclosure - I work exclusively on Cisco gear and 95% on voice, so I may be slightly biased.
Asterisk is a cool name though.......
Fonality CEO Chris Lyman Podcast
Your statement above:
"The reality that I see from our smaller customers is that they know next to nothing about phone systems, and they don't want to know the nuts and bolts - they just want it to work."
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Reinforces why Dell chose Fonality as their SMB VoIP business partner.
To learn more details about why Dell specifically chose Fonality, you may wish to listen to the following:
Fonality CEO Chris Lyman Podcast
Here's to banning truck rolls forever!
Sincerely,
Brad Reese
http://www.BradReese.Com
Cisco vs. Fonality (not Cisco vs. Asterisk)
Hi there,
First, let me say that my intention is not to Cisco bash. I think they are a good company with good products. I have long admired Cisco.
That being said, I believe their PBX products have three fundamental problems: expensive, complicated, and proprietary. This combo tends to drain the budget up-front as it requires highly-trained personnel to install. It also drains the budget over time as the management/maintenance is brutal. Then, bake in Cisco’s proprietary approach (can you say: no native SIP? can you say: must use Cisco phones?) and it further hurts the bottom line of the business.
This is all well-and-good for the enterprise space -- they have thick IT budgets. However, for the SMB (small-medium-biz) segment, which shops with its wallet, this trio of “expensive”, “complicated”, and “proprietary” is a nasty combo. It is this triple knockout punch that disables Cisco’s ability to effectively serve the SMB market – or certainly the lower 50% of it.
So, “complicated”, “expensive”, and “proprietary” are nothing new for telecom. The SMB segment has long suffered at the hands of the "big iron" companies you named. And, Cisco knows about this problem. That is why they acquired LinkSys for some-odd half-bill a few years ago. However, LinkSys products are typically aimed at SoHo or the very lower-end of the SMB. In short, Cisco has a giant hole in its lineup in the SBM space. This space, depending on who you talk to, is between 50 and 70% of the market.
Now, you mentioned Asterisk when referencing Fonality. First, to be clear, Asterisk (or our highly-modified fork of it) is less than 10% of our application stack. Our improved-Asterisk is that which handles the call switching (SIP Stack, etc.) But, the important thing about being Open Source-based is that is forces us to remain standards-based. Standards are a good thing for the buying customer – engendering natural integration with the rest of their back office. This further reduces their long-term IT spend.
But, Fonality brings much more to the table than simply an improved version of Asterisk. In fact, Asterisk is just a single element of what we call our “foundation stack”. This stack also includes Linux, Apache, and Mysql. It is upon this stack that Fonality has created its true value – what we call our “application layer”. Our application layer is 2 million lines of code and growing (contrast that to Asterisk which is 200,000 and you get the point).
The Fonality magic resides in this application layer. It is this layer that that delivers the ease-of-install, ease-of-use, and very strong feature-set. See an example of one of our applications. And, it is this application layer (actually the price for which we deliver this layer) that makes Cisco look like an import beer. It may have a fancier bottle, but it costs a heck of a lot more and gets you drunk at exactly the same speed.
It was also this application layer that helped Dell selected us as their partner. Not only was Fonality the right price, but it was downright easy to install and use. In short, they rolled a Fonality solution in their labs and liked what they saw.
In closing, Fonality is countering the triple-combo of Cisco (expensive/complicated/proprietary) with our own combo of affordable, easy-to-use, and standards-based. We expect this new combo to be a huge boon for the SMB segment and those (such as you) who serve them.
Oh, our reseller programs also offer up to 50% margin. http://www.trixbox.com.
Sincerely,
Chris Lyman
Fonality CEO and Janitor
CEO / Janitor Blog
Import beers
Chris:
You, sir, may bash Cisco at will. However, you have stepped well outside the bounds of civil discourse by maligning the importation of our liquid manna: the beer.
Newcastle! Guiness! Franziskaner! These are stalwarts... nay... *saints* of the modern day!
How dare you! If this were my kingdom, you would be off to the guillotine! Heretic!
Sincerely,
Avid drinker of the import beers
Cisco Makes Communication Easy for Small Business
There is a vast quantity of small business customers with a wide range of product needs, so what is the right for one will not mean it is the right solution for all. Cisco has both premier solutions based on the UC500 and budget solutions based on the Linksys LVS.
Most vendors like to drive home the fear that Cisco is too complicated and expensive for small business, when that is simply not true. My suggestion is to sit down with a Cisco VAR or your Cisco Territory Market Manger, and see a demo of the UC500. The UC500 delivers a lot of enterprise class features and puts it into a simple solution that small business can manage. Do not confuse Cisco’s small business products with their enterprise products; this is what most Cisco competitors like to talk about when they say complex and expensive. Make sure if you are a small business that you get the facts and talk to someone who knows the UC500 and SBCS line. www.Cisco.com/go/sbcs
Misleading truths of Fonality and Open Source
The line between open source vs. proprietary becomes grey quickly. Asterisk, the foundation to most “open source” IP PBX solutions, only delivers a standard set of features. Once provider like Fonality or other Asterisk VARs modify or add on to this code/feature set the solutions now becomes as “proprietary“ as any other solution on the market. As Fonality’s CEO states, “Asterisk (or our highly-modified fork of it) is less than 10% of our application stack. Our improved-Asterisk is that which handles the call switching (SIP Stack, etc.)”. What this means is that they have written on top of an open source solution and modified it with their own code, making it a proprietary solution based on open source code.
Fonality’s CEO goes on to say, “But, the important thing about being Open Source-based is that is forces us to remain standards-based. Standards are a good thing for the buying customer – engendering natural integration with the rest of their back office.”
This is where he tries to blur definitions between “Open Source” and “Standards Based”. Open Source means that the source code is openly given to you when you buy the product, so that you can do what ever you want to it. However, Standards based means it is governed by an international or regional consortium, of interested members, that agree on a set way to deploy a technology. So, what they are trying to do is blur the line between Fonality’s modified Open Source (Not standards based) Phone system and those things that are Standards based, like SIP endpoints, and TAPI Connections. The base call processing starting out as open source does not give you “natural intigration with the rest of your back office”, it is the standard protocals that allow connections from MS applications and network devices that deliver this and Fonality has nothing to do with these.
Fonality + Modified Open source = Proprietary Call Processing
Depends on What the Definition of SIP is:
The thing to know about standards is that it can takes decades for a standard to fully mature, like WiFi 802.11x, IP, IP-Sec for security, Power over Ethernet for powering Ethernet attached devices. The reason for this is a lack of agreement on what the standard will be or not knowing how the technology will grow. To give you an idea of this, the SIP protocol is over 12 years old, but the IETF’s SIP standard is only on a 2.0 release. Most deployments of SIP are ether pre-standard or proprietary enhancement of the standard. The reason for this is that the true SIP standard only defines a set list of 10 to 15 features. These are very basic features and functionality and anyhting above them are a modification of the SIP Standard. When you modify the standard, once again you are back to proprietary, (But yes, it is based on a standard).
Cisco in fact embraces standards and highly encourages the adoption of these standards. When a technology standard is ratified and fully developed, Cisco will adopt the standard and implement it in its technology. When you look at the IETF SIP working group it is lead by members of Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, Soft Armor, and NeuStar, Fonality is not listed.
Fonality says that you can go out and get any SIP phone and have it work on their system, that might be true, but you will not get full feature sets on it, nor will all endpoints be supported. When you look at the Fonality web page you can clearly see that there are only 9 supported SIP phones (The Cisco 7960 being one of them). All of these are running SIP enhanced software that give them the ability to do more the then basic features that are set buy the IETF. Cisco on the other hand has over 20 different phones to chose from that can run both the SIP standard or Cisco’s SCCP protocol. SCCP is what gives you all the advanced features that you need to have an effective phone system, just like Fonality’s Proprietary SIP implementation.
Fonality + Modified SIP = Proprietary
Cisco preaching on open standards?
These posts must be written by either a Cisco fanboy or a Cisco employee (likely). Only one of these two type of people could ever try to pretend that Cisco is a standards based company because it sits on some committee. They support SIP as an afterthought!
Phonality may have some of their software hosted, but at least their stuff is based on Asterisk which means it will always be 100% more standards based than anything by Cisco.