snom technologies AG has rolled out the snom ONE mini, a compact version of its IP PBX (News - Alert) appliance for the small office/home office (SOHO) market. The new device supports 20 extension and supports the full range of snom ONE features, giving resellers a way to provide a plug-and-play on-premise business telephony solution.

Many of you may be familiar with the snom ONE plus, a larger rack-mountable appliance that scales from two to 50 extensions and has the option for four to 16 cards to provide PSTN connections. At $599 list, the snom ONE is a simplified, all-SIP, "solid state" device with no moving parts -- that's no fans, no disk drives, nothing mechanical that could be prone to wear and break -- and a low-power design that consumes less than a tenth of a power of a typical PC.

With dimensions are  of 6.5" (L) × 5.6" (W) × 1.1" (H) and power supplied via its Gigabit PoE port or an external power supply, you can stick it under a desk or attach it to a wall to keep it out of the way. Since it is "all-SIP" there aren't any ports for PSTN connectivity; you'll have to get a gateway if you want RJ-11 things kicking around the office.

One of the features snom is underlining for the ONE mini are support for backup and failover services for existing hosted or on-premise phone systems. Since snom phones can be simultaneously registered to multiple systems, the snom ONE mini can serve as a contingency option if a hosted or larger on-prem system goes down.

snom COO, Mike Storella (News - Alert) believes the device has potential in the company's traditional reseller channels and for service providers wanting to provide an on-premise solution. Start with the snom ONE mini, add a SIP trunk service and bundle together with snom phones for a turn-key plug-and-play system. Throw in a snom PA1 for broadcast announcements and you cover a lot of ground.

From a larger perspective, snom's continued march into appliance solutions reflects some trends and pushback that hosted PBX solutions aren't quite yet the be-all, end-all for the SMB market.   ADTRAN (News - Alert) executives have observed that the "small" in the SMB sector crunch total cost of ownership (TCO) between a per-monthly hosted service and an "owned" on-site IP PBX and find the economics favor buying a hardware solution over a hosting after two to three years term. 

The question for everyone in the IP PBX market is where the "sweet spot" between the small business "Let's buy" and the larger "Let's host/we like OpEX over CapEX" business falls.

snom is a Gold sponsor of ITEXPO West 2012. To be held Oct. 2-5 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX, ITEXPO (News - Alert) is the world’s premier IP communications event. Visit snom in booth #921. For more information on ITEXPO click here.