Fonality announce a new enterprise telephony appliance based on trixbox and a range of complementary professional support options. The trixbox Appliance comes pre-installed with the trixbox software platform and is an industrial grade rack-mountable server with dual hard disk and dual power supply redundancy options. It is aimed at businesses with five to 500 employees and can be purchased for use with VoIP, E1/T1 or up to 48 analog lines. Created for trixbox and Asterisk resellers, as well as IT professionals, the trixbox Appliance costs $999 and delivers the industry’s best price performance value for a PBX.

The trixbox Appliance is powered by Intel and comes with pre-configured Sangoma line cards with industry-leading Octasic echo-cancellation hardware inside. Broad support for the appliance has been announced by a growing trixbox ecosystem that includes phone manufacturers Polycom, Aastra, and Grandstream, as well as VoIP service providers VoicePulse and Teliax.

“We are excited about the new Intel-based trixbox Appliance, which combines an innovative SME offering with Polycom’s line of standards-based high quality IP phones,” said Sunil Bhalla, senior vice president and general manager of voice communications at Polycom. “The open source telephony market is proving to be very viable and Fonality’s appliance should be a great addition because of its feature set and flexibility.”

The trixbox Appliance includes trixbox 2.2, a new release of the popular distribution that integrates Asterisk with Apache, MySQL, SugarCRM and PHP. Included in this release is the new open source Asterisk GUI (graphical user interface), a component of the AsteriskNow distribution, which gives customers an additional trixbox GUI option.

In addition to delivering an appliance, Fonality is offering professional support options to ensure that a reliable trixbox engineer is always just a phone call away. A new suite of comprehensive technical support packages can be purchased on an annual basis for a complete deployment, or in hourly increments for ad hoc support.

“The trixbox Appliance, built on Intel-based servers, is another proof point that open source telephony solutions can deliver full-featured yet very affordable solutions to the global mid-market,” said Lisa Lambert, managing director, Software and Solutions Group, Intel Capital. “Fonality's investment in trixbox should provide the opportunity for the company to grow their market position and leadership.”

“While Fonality has long offered its own PBXtra appliance, we felt the trixbox community also needed a reliable hardware appliance to run their trixbox software. Price pressure is forcing do-it-yourselfers to put together systems based on mediocre hardware not meant for the rigors of a busy phone system,” said Chris Lyman, Fonality CEO. “Our goal was to create a box that had enterprise performance, but still came in at under $1,000 bucks.”

For more information about the trixbox Appliance, trixbox 2.2 and trixbox support options, please visit www.trixbox.org.