Oz Company reaps benefits from merger with Fonality

In November 2007, Insightful Solutions merged with Fonality, a provider of IP PABX systems based in Los Angeles, California. The combination of Insightful's and Fonality's CRM expertise offers SMBs a solution that unifies their communications.

Insightful Solutions was formed by Rick Bushell and Marc Englaro in 2005 shortly after the first release of the SugarCRM product, an opensource based CRM offering.

Marc Englaro, CEO of Insightful Solutions told CRN that both founders recognised an opportunity to provide an open-source software model in a commercial environment.

“Fonality is a unified communications and contact centre solutions provider for small and medium-sized businesses. The PBXtra and trixbox Pro product lines are based on Fonality's patent-pending Anywhere Management hybrid-hosted architecture. It also includes a version of open source Asterisk code base that has been modified for commercial use,” said Englaro.

Englaro said that in the six months prior to the merger Insightful had been working closely with Fonality, integrating its CRM solution with Fonality’s call centre product.

“During those six months we wondered how we could work strategically with each other because our orgnisations had the same size customer base and you can’t get much more aligned than a merger,” he said.

On the 23rd of January it was announced that Dell US had signed an OEM agreement with Fonality.

“The agreement will allow Dell to integrate Fonality’s phone system software onto its hardware products. Although we won’t see any immediate benefits, it’s still an exciting relationship with a very large vendor with brand recognition," said Englaro.

"The Dell agreement with Fonality hasn’t been extended to Australia yet, but if it goes well, and I am sure it will, then it will be only a matter of time.”

In the meantime, Insightful solutions has announced the availability in Australia and New Zealand of Fonality’s trixbox Pro, an enterprise-grade IP phone system specifically designed for SMBs, and scalable from five to 500 branch extensions.

trixbox Pro is software-based IP PABX system that delivers enterprise-class features at small business prices. These features include auto-attendant, unified messaging between voicemail and email, in-house conference rooms, branch locations, home workers and presence management.

“In addition to traditional PSTN dialling and PBX features, trixbox Pro includes an embedded corporate chat server, advanced call centre features and the ability to integrate with Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce.com and SugarCRM,” said Englaro.

Englaro told CRN that sales of Insightful products were doing well in the US, with the products rebranded as Fonality.

“We are still known as Insightful in Australia and there are plans to rebrand to Fonality and repositions ourselves on the marketplace, later this year,” he said.

Insightful/Fonality now has eleven staff in Sydney and over 100 staff based in Los Angeles. Fonality also has offices in the UK and Brazil.

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