Fonality Records 15 Quarters of High Growth, Leads Open Source Telephony Market

Los Angeles, CA – Fonality®, the leading provider of open source business communications systems, announced today that the first quarter of 2008 marked its fifteenth consecutive quarter of high growth, and that the company has doubled in size each year since its founding in 2004. Key to the company’s success is a reinvention of the architecture and delivery of the modern day business phone system. Today, 5,000 commercial customers worldwide depend on Fonality’s PBXtra® and trixbox Pro® products for affordable, VoIP-powered unified communications. In addition, Fonality’s open source project, trixbox CE, has achieved three million downloads and is now the number one open source telephony project in the world.

“We’ve at least doubled in size every year since we started Fonality in 2004,” said Chris Lyman, Fonality CEO. “We’ve done this by staying focused on our bread and butter: making telephony affordable, easy to use and standards-based. This is in stark contrast to an industry that seems fixated on keeping telephony expensive, complicated, and proprietary, a trend that continues to create enormous growth opportunities for Fonality in a $20 billion dollar global market.”

“Telephony becoming a component of a complete unified communications solution is causing a landscape evolution and giving rise to a number of new products and companies that hold significant growth potential,” says Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Krithi Rao.

Fonality has rebuilt the business phone system from the ground up with the goal of creating a low-cost product that is easy for a small or medium-sized business to install and manage. Adoption of Fonality products has come from companies wanting a modern, feature-rich alternative to costly systems from companies like Avaya and Cisco, and one that will grow with them and not need replacing or upgrading on regular intervals.

Fonality’s patented hybrid-hosted architecture, call center applications, as well as a rich set of unified communication applications, have helped fuel the company’s success. A hybrid-hosted approach combines the benefits of a hardware PBX with the affordability and ease of use of a hosted offering. It also enables a variety of fixed-mobile convergence capabilities that allow employee identity to be maintained whether they are working at the office, at home or traveling. The award-winning HUD® application works with the core system and provides a unified view of chat, email, and calling for all fixed and mobile workers.

Fonality has created a powerful distribution channel comprised of computer consultants, VARs and OEMs. Today, more than 7,000 data VARs have signed onto the Fonality reseller program. The company also formed a strategic partnership with Dell and a distribution agreement with PC Mall.

Fonality now has 130 employees, with offices in five countries, and operates five global data centers. In addition to standard phone systems, the company has more than 1,300 Fonality-powered call centers and 125,000 active unified communications desktops.

“We have created an entirely new category of business communications – the small business call center,” added Lyman. “We realized early on that ‘call center’ doesn’t just mean 1,000 agents in cubicles. If you have 15 employees with three sales and three support guys, you’ve got a call center. We make call center software cost effective and easy enough for this market to quickly adopt.”

About Fonality
Fonality, www.fonality.com, is a leader in business phone systems and contact center solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. Used by over 5,000 companies and 100,000 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. The PBXtra and trixbox Pro product lines are based on Fonality's patent-pending Anywhere Management™ Hybrid-Hosted™ architecture, plus an improved version of the popular open source Asterisk code base which has been modified to add reliability, stability and enterprise-class features. PBXtra and trixbox Pro deliver the advanced capabilities of an enterprise-class phone system for 40 to 80 percent less than traditional offerings. Fonality's fully free and open source telephony platform, trixbox CE (www.trixbox.org), is home to one of the world's largest and fastest growing communities of open source telephony users, with over 200,000 live deployments and 125,000 new downloads each month. Fonality headquarters are in Los Angeles. Company investors include Azure Capital Partners and Intel Capital.

Fonality, PBXtra, trixbox, and HUD are registered trademarks and Hybrid-Hosted and Anywhere Management are trademarks of Fonality. Other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.