About Us
Who is Fonality?
Fonality, founded in 2003 before Asterisk 1.0, is recognized as the first company to offer a commercial Asterisk-based product to the public. This product, PBXtra, launched in 2004, is now deployed to over 2,000 customer sites with 50,000 phones in 37 countries. Our customers have made a collective 75,000,000 calls across the PBXtra platform. In fact, we have spent the last four years commercially hardening our Asterisk-based foundation, building an intense 300,000 lines of code application layer on top of it. Click here to see a demo of just one of our applications.
Where can I learn more about PBXtra?
Best found here: http://fonality.com/features.
Why acquire and then sponsor trixbox?
The Asterisk market is analogous to the construction market. Asterisk, in our analogy, is raw building materials: hammers, nails, etc. So, if you are a construction company, you can use native Asterisk to build your own house. However, if you don’t happen to be a full-blown construction company (and most aren’t), then you need a Home Depot to accelerate the house you are building. We see trixbox as the “Home Depot” of the Asterisk ecosystem. trixbox is the place where thousands of savvy “handymen” gather in order to build beautiful telephony homes. (BTW, sticking to the analogy, our commercial PBXtra product would be a “pre-fab house” built and delivered to your doorstep along with all your phones pre-configured and ready to use).
What is HUD?
HUD, which stands for Head’s Up Display, is a robust desktop application (Windows, Mac, Linux) that Fonality has built over the past two years. HUD is part operator panel, part instant messenger client, part outlook integration, part CRM, and all presence management. HUD comes in two flavors: HUDlite, our free version built for the trixbox platform, and our commercial version for PBXtra (simply called “HUD”) which has been deployed to over 1,000 businesses. See a HUD demo here: http://fonality.com/hud and read about HUD features: http://www.fonality.com/hudpro_features.html
What is the trixbox project all about?
The trixbox projects has three basic tenants: choice, community, and price.
Choice
First, there is choice -- this burgeoning open telephony market needs choice in terms of hardware (so many card manufactures to choose from), choice in terms of GUIs, and choice in terms of which software to install with their telephony deployment. The trixbox software platform and the trixbox appliance help to ease some of the frustrations that come from choice. The new trixbox support program also helps trixboxers in their hour of need.
Community
Without the trixbox community there would be no trixbox. It is this community that works every day to help each other in their own trixbox endeavors. Questions are asked and answered on the forum – over 45,000 in the past few months. Bugs are reported and squashed. This thriving community has quickly grown to become the largest on-line Asterisk community and the place to get trixbox and Asterisk questions answered.
Price (and “free” as in beer and freedom)
The trixbox project is founded on the belief that software should be free. Fonality has no intention to change this basic principle. For this reason, we have licensed trixbox under the GNU 2.0 GPL. trixbox carries no restrictions on re-branding (rip out our logo, that’s ok!) and people are free to commercially re-distribute it.
