B601 Launch at Astricon

Today, Sangoma is announcing the launch of its newest hybrid telephony card at Astricon 2009 in Glendale Arizona. The new B601 integrates a Digital interface (T1/E1) with a few analog ports (4 FXO, 1 FXS) all on a single, small PCI/PCIe card. This allows PBX platform vendors to deliver solutions that are more compact and even more cost effective than before. Our partner Rockbochs has integrated the board in one of its Asterisk-based PBX appliances and is ready to take orders on an integrated box that includes this new card.

We’re also fortunate to have a few product reviews by some of our online retailer partners. Look for reviews to be posted on the web in the next while.

If you are a PBX system developer or reseller, you need to have a look at this product. Check it out at http://www.sangoma.com/products/hardware_products/digital_analog_hybrids/b601.html

Sangoma in Brazil

This week, Sangoma is participating in FutureCom in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The company has recently increased its presence and marketing efforts in Latin America and in particular in Brazil, with the announcement of a new distributor, the participation at two important tradeshows (Encontro VoIP Center in September and FutureCom this week), and some key customer announcements. Today, Sangoma is announcing that partner Digivox has deployed 6,000 ports of IVR based on Asterisk Open Source Telephony and Sangoma cards, at Banco do Brazil, the country's largest financial institution. The systems will processs 35 million cals per month. That is truly impressive...



Sangoma has had terrific customer successes in this country, from telephony operators using Sangoma's SS7-to-SIP solution to provide VoIP termination to both customers and enterprises, all the way to packaged PBX and IVR solutions built on our leading telephony interface cards. Unfortunately, we've been a bit too quiet about it and in my recent visit in Sao Paulo, I found that the Sangoma brand, although well respected, was not prevalent enough. People just did not know enough about our company and products. Further, it seemed that people had an impression that the products were costly and difficult to obtain in Brazil. With our new distributor ShopNetworks, the product is now readily available, fully serviced locally and now more affordable than ever. As for the lack of visibility from Sangoma, this is now changing rapidly, with key announcements and better participation in local events.



Digivox's deployment at Banco do Brazil is impressive and these guys have a lot more going on wth key financial institutions in Latin America. We'r glad to have them standardize their IVR and PBX solutions on Sangoma hardware. We're also convinced that a lot more companies will start seeing the benefit of open source telephony used in conjunction with our cards...

Sangoma and Open Source Telephony

Sangoma's roots are in Open Source. The company has invested significantly to be a dominant board vendor in this space.

Alex and his team at Halo, one of Sangoma's long time business partners, has written a great article on his own analysis of the two main players for PCI cards in the Asterisk market: Sangoma and Digium. I'm obviously biased, but his analysis looks very thorough and sound. Have a read and decide for yourself:

http://www.halokwadrat.pl/sangoma-vs.-digium.html

Also, Sangoma is not exclusive to Asterisk. Sangoma is very active in other major open source telephony projects such as FreeSwitch, Call Weaver, Yate, etc. There are rumours that FreeSwitch is getting attention from major industry players, which might lead one to believe they will become a very important player in the space in the near future...I'm just reporting on rumours here. See Tony's blog at:

http://schmoozecom.blogspot.com/


Last minute edit: Actually, the rumours have been clarified in this interview:

http://www.voipstore.com/2009/06/interview-with-anthony-minessale-from-freeswitch/

Still, we can see that FreeSwitch is becoming more and more important in the community...

So to all of you open source developers out there. Why not choose the independent PCI card vendor that brings quality and innovation to all major open source telephony projects out there? Would you lock yourself with a supplier that may compete with you or who's products only work with specific open source projects?