A Week In Miami, Open Source in the Sun

The big news here at IT Expo in Miami Beach is the partnership between Fonality and Dell announced Tuesday and broken on Rich Tehrani's Blog.

Fonality is a provider of unified communications and contact center solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. According to Lyman, Dell partnered with Fonality because it was looking for three things, must be high in value; must be super easy to use; must run on Dell.

I sat in on the presentation given by Fonality on the floor today. They have made a tremendous amount of progress after the investment by Intel and they now boast 3000 small business customers. Their product is matured and well rounded offering tremendous value.

A couple of things make sense with this announcement. Firstly is the feature rich offering for small business is seriously compelling. And secondly Dell has between 6 and 7 million small business customers who they can tap into with this serious plug and play offering.

Also I understand that the phone partner is Aastra and the media gateway is Sangoma which rounds out the offering.

• VoIP / Convergence