Last week, Cisco Capital announced a financing solution that created a brand new Hardware as a Service (HAAS) business model for Cisco Partners seeking to sell Cisco Unified Communications solutions to small and midsize businesses.
Previously, Cisco tried to get into the SMB telephony market with Linksys One.
That huge initiative appears to have failed.
Where can I buy it?
Where are the partners?
What happened to this huge Cisco initiative?
My guess?
It's dead.
So perhaps the Cisco Hardware as a Service (HAAS) business model is the last hope Cisco has to get their expensive unified communications stuff affordable enough for the small portion of the SMB market.
Keep in mind that this market is a game worth playing for Cisco:
$7 billion USA PBX space.
$20 billion Global PBX space.
Thrashing the new Cisco HAAS business model, Fonality has introduced Cisco functionality at scandalously low prices.
Fonality's new phone system release, PBXtra 4.0, has pulverized the pricing of the new Cisco HAAS business model:
| Fonality 73 User System - Cheaper Phones | |
| Users | 73 |
| Server + Software | $995 |
| Phone + Phone Prov. Fee | $164 |
| HUD Pro | $995 |
| Fonality Total Over 4 Years | $13,962.00 |
| Cisco HAAS 73 User System | |
| Users | 73 |
| Cost Per Day | $1.15 |
| Days in Year | 365 |
| Years | 4 |
| Cisco Total Over 4 Years | $122,567.00 |
Now, if Fonality went hog wild and gave customers amazing phones:
That is better than Cisco phones, the $164 would change to $290
So the total Fonality price would rise from $13,962 to $23,160
Even so, the top Fonality solution is almost $100K cheaper than Cisco.
| Fonality 73 User System - Awesome Phones | |
| Users | 73 |
| Server + Software | $995 |
| Phone + Phone Prov. Fee | $290 |
| HUD Pro | $995 |
| Fonality Total Over 4 Years | $23,160.00 |
Competitive Price Analysis: talkswitch - 3Com - Avaya
View more Fonality Pricing!
 "The next evolution of this space, is where your phone system uses artificial intelligence to figure out what the best way is to find you, vs. just ringing a dumb device," said Chris Lyman - CEO/CTO of Fonality. |
"This is the approach that Fonality is taking with PBXtra 4.0."
"We use a series of methods, such as keyboard and mouse activity, to figure out if you are at your desk. If you aren’t, we send the call to your cell phone."
PBXtra 4.0 includes FindMe with Boomerang Mobile Integration:
This new features use presence detection to automatically find employees on their mobile devices, allowing them to answer the call or bounce it to another extension.
The new FindMe capability in PBXtra 4.0 ups the ante in the Find-Me-Follow-Me feature wars.
Not only does it allow employees to decide when and how they will be found according to their personal schedule and rules, but FindMe also has built-in presence detection.
The system observes a person’s keyboard and mouse activity and can route calls to their mobile phone or other number when they are inactive on their computer.
 Boomerang Mobile Integration deepens Fonality’s commitment toward unifying the PC, the desk phone and the mobile phone. |
It allows calls sent to mobile phones to be boomeranged back to any extension by pressing a few keys on the mobile phone.
Boomeranged calls can also be recorded from a mobile phone and automatically stored on the PBXtra server.
FONcall is a new PBXtra plug-in for the Firefox web browser and is the first one-click dialing application for business telephony.
It turns a phone number on any site into a link.
By clicking the link, PBXtra will automatically take an Aastra and Polycom phone off the hook and dial out to the number hands-free.
PBXtra 4.0 also deepens branch office integration by merging spell-by-name directories, allowing callers to dial into one branch and find an employee at any other branch anywhere in the world.
PBXtra 4.0 contains significant enhancements for Fonality’s growing reseller base.
A consolidated interface allows resellers to manage all of their PBXtra customers from a single Web-based administration interface, with hot switching between installations.
A new network card configuration option allows for custom configuration of analog and PRI and T1 cards.
New alerts are now available so resellers can receive email to text messages when issues arise with a PRI, RAID disk, analog line voltage, and a host of other indicators.
Country support has also been added so administrators can set a server to the host country it is located in, and PBXtra will automatically configure the relevant telecom settings.
Used by over 5,000 companies and 1,000,000 end users in 100 countries, Fonality's award winning IP-PBX VoIP phone systems have connected more than 225,000,000 mission critical phone calls.
By the way, Fonality CEO - Chris Lyman has impressed yours truly during our personal interactions!
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Brad Reese cofounded BradReese.Com Cisco Refurbished which offers one year warranties on Cisco Refurbished and Cisco Repair.
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are you serious?
Your not even comparing apples to apples. Your going to put 75 people on a $995 server with 256Meg of RAM? get real! and what kind of phones are you comparing against? Aastra 9112?
Get real.
Not apples to apples, but still a huge difference...
You are correct, for an implementation that size, you would get one of the more robust Fonality servers with more RAM, RAID, T1 card, etc. That would probably be a couple of grand more. YOu could also go to Pro or Call center edition with Fonality and have a lot more functionality than if they are talking about Call Manager Express. So maybe it isn't $23k, but $26k or something. Either way, that is still alot less than $122k. The phones are probably Polycom. You can even use Cisco phones with the system (and Cisco switches, for that matter, if you want) but it costs more.
i agree with this guy
I love fonality products, and i recommend them to everyone. however your build is HEAVILY skewed. i think fonality recommends a new server for every 50 users, so you're going to want 2 of the 1995 servers with the dual core, and you're also going to need money for the 3 other years of support, as only 1 year is included with the base contract. still no where near the cisco price, but you heavily lowballed the fonality system, and it makes your argument seem very weak indeed.
Actually the quote is pretty close
While I could suggest some slight tweaks to Brad's quote, it is actually pretty accurate. Our $995 minitower solution is rated for 10 PRI/analog Queue calls (which use 2-4x the resources of normal non-queue calls). Now, if your calls are pure SIP/VoIP then of course that CPU can do more calls, because it is the transcoding from TDM-to-SIP that puts strain on the CPU.
Our next server option up from the base $995 unit is a Dell Optiplex 330. This upgrade is $699 and that server is rated for 23 Queue calls, or a full T1/PRI. This upgraded minitower has a faster CPU and 2 hard drives (software RAID), which is really important since hard disks are the most likely component to fail inside of a server.
More about our server options here: www.fonality.com/pop.cgi?page=pop_servers.tt&server=dell_tower
…and…
http://fonality.com/pbxtra_pricing.cgi
Our new line of Dell servers handle MANY more calls than our old HP line, so readers of this blog might be used to the old HP concurrent call stats.
Someone asked how many concurrent calls you should expect for a business of 73 users? Typically, businesses will use a 4 or 5-to-1 ratio of employees to phone lines. So, in the example above, if you have 73 employees you should expect to need about 15-20 phone lines. Thus, if you are going PRI as the respondent suggested, then I would recommend upgrading Brad's server quote from $995 to ($995 + $699) for a total of $1,694. This moves his two Fonality quotes from $13,962 to $14,661 or from $23,160 to $23,859. Note: if you are quoting a PRI system from either Cisco or Fonality you will need to add a PRI card. I think Brad was looking at a pure VoIP solution, so that card is not included. For edification, this card will run you around $1,000, or a couple hundred more if you want Hardware Echo Cancellation (which I recommend, as even a rare case of echo can drive a business user crazy).
I noted that a reader suggested that you would be crazy to run a business of 73 employees on a minitower server. Well, Fonality has around 150 employees and we run our entire business on that very same Dell Optiplex 330. We average about 15 calls and peak around 40, so, yeah, we are only just now beginning to outgrow it.
Now, there are reasons why I would *not* recommend that larger businesses (even us) use the minitower solution. Primarily, it does not have dual power supplies. Power supplies are the second most likely component to fail in your server after your hard disk. So, if businesses can afford it, I recommend they upgrade to our Dell 1U. This upgrades has: dual power supplies, server-level components which are going to last longer in the field, 1 GB RAM upgrade, and Hardware RAID. I like Hardware RAID better because it allows the server to run faster as the I/O bus doesn’t get constantly clogged with dual disk traffic. Finally, if you are a call center, and are doing things like call recording, I would highly recommend the faster CPU of the Dell 1U.
I want to take a moment and respond to a few reader questions:
A reader above asked if the base $995 minitower had 256MB of RAM. Answer: no, since we moved from HP to Dell it now has 512MB of RAM in it. That is more than enough for its purpose, as our data center offloads many of the memory or CPU intensive activities (such as running call reports on thousands of CDRs).
I also saw that a reader suggested that you pay for support. I totally agree. While our Dell minitower comes with a 1 year onsite next-day warranty and the Dell 1u comes with a 3 year onsite, these are just hardware warranties. I highly recommend you actually pay for support from Fonality so you can call us 24x7 with questions about your overall phone system. I don’t know if his quoted Cisco price included phone support, but I wouldn’t ever deploy a mission-critical solution (like a phone system) without paying for support from the vendor.
Another reader asked if the quoted price was for Aastra phones. Brad actually quoted two prices. One was in the $13K range and one was in the $23K range. The price in the $13K range was using Aastra 9112 phones. The price in the $23K range was using Polycom 501 phones.
So, my recommendations for Brad's quote:
1. Add $699 for the server.
2. Consider buying support for your phone system.
Finally, if you want some of the professional features of our higher-end software like conference bridges, intercom/paging, etc you could add another $1,000 to both quotes to upgrade from “Standard Edition” to “Professional Edition”. That would move his two quotes from $13K and $23K to $14K and $24K.
Throw in the $699 Dell Optiplex 330 minitower upgrade and you will find that, overall, Brad got it pretty darn close.
--
Chris Lyman
Fonality CEO & Janitor
CEO/Janitor blog: http://www.trixbox.com/about-us/blog