Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Digium buys Switchvox, MS Joins the fray

Tristan Degenhardt's PBX company, Switchvox, was acquired by Digium. Switchvox is a Digium reseller with "65,000 end points." (I'm assuming that means handsets and softphones, but who knows). This is yet another consolidation move in the telecom space. More to come I'm sure since there are too many PBX vendors right now.

Meanwhile, Microsoft launched a phone system for very small businesses - at a sub-$3000 price point - with partners D-Link, Quanta, and Aastra. Phone+ had this:

“Microsoft Response Point, a premises-based phone system aimed at the very smallest of SMBs, certainly has competitive pricing and the integration with Outlook is a value-add,” said the Yankee Group’s Steve Hilton. “Of particular interest is the ’Magic‘ button which brings voice recognition technology into the world of the SMB in a new way. The biggest challenge for Microsoft is in its current reliance on the D-Link and Quanta channels to get the product into SMBs. We look forward to Response Point's availability through the massive Microsoft channel and distributors like CDW, as well as the globalization of the Response Point solution.”
It's going to start getting bloody in this space - as MS steps into to compete with Cisco's Linksys One system, which has not exactly been a screamer, and with Cisco's Call Manager Express.

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