<<<... "They all build proprietary phone systems in what's a big market—a $20 billion market worldwide. We needed a phone system for a prior business and screamed when we got the price tag back," he said. "We said, ‘We've got to beat this; we've got to beat it back.'" Fonality dragged its prices down by using commoditized PC hardware, from Dell or the like, with low-cost phones that it doesn't make itself. The company also cut prices by using open-source software. The third leg of the low-cost telephony stool was to ditch the need for technicians to climb into trucks and charge $150 an hour, achieved with a network of resellers who make changes and upgrades from their offices, over the Internet. Thus was born Fonality's hybrid hosted offering. It didn't make sense to investors at first blush, but at this point, it has one, very large believer: Dell. Dell in January let it be known that it's making a play for the SMB VOIP space by partnering with Fonality and Nortel: two open-source IP telephony and Unified Communications vendors whose software Dell will bundle with its hardware to offer easily managed products that self-install and promise to save small companies time and money. Dell is plugging in IP telephony products from Fonality and Nortel to bring VOIP to the masses in a set of integrated, plug-in boxes. Click here for the story. Other new features in PBXtra 4.0 include a new plug-in, called FONcall, for Firefox browsers that turns any phone number on any site into a link.

Clicking the link then automatically takes a Fonality Aastra phone or a Fonality Polycom conference phone off the hook and dials out to the number, hands-free. PBXtra 4.0 is also designed to tie branch offices tighter together by merging spell-by-name directories, meaning a caller only has to dial in to one branch and can then reach employees at any other branch. Other new features include a consolidated interface for resellers to manage their PBXtra customers from a central, Web-based interface, with hot-switching enabled between installations. Resellers now will also be able to receive alerts in e-mail to text messages when issues arise with a PRI, RAID disk, analog line voltage and other areas. Also, PBXtra now lets administrators automatically configure country-appropriate telecom settings on servers. One other new feature is a new network card configuration option that enables custom configuration of analyst and PRI and T-1 cards.