Grandstream has announced that its  GVC3200 videoconferencing system and GXP1600 IP phone series have been certified with Elastix (News - Alert), an open source unified communications server.

“We’re thrilled the Elastix community can now widen their range of services by offering solid video-conferencing capabilities to new or existing deployments with the GVC3200 from Grandstream,” Elastix CEO Edgar Landivar said. “Our partnership with Grandstream strives to offer fully interoperable hardware to guarantee optimal performance of Elastix solutions. Grandstream’s new small business IP-phones are positioned to increase the price-to-performance ratio always found with Elastix UC solutions.”

Similar to Asterisk (News - Alert), the other major open source IP telephony project, Elastix is available for free while being backed by a commercial organization. Elastix actually builds on Asterisk to add features geared toward call centers and adding call recording, fax-to-email, caller ID, call recording and CRM, among others.

It’s actually a complete Linux distribution based on CentOS, which is in turn the open source version of Red Hat (News - Alert) Enterprise Linux, but packaged in a turnkey solution. Elastix sells its own hardware and support services while distributing the software for free.

What the Grandstream certification offers is a guarantee that its hardware phones will work with Elastix. As anyone who’s contended with a Linux installation can attest, hardware support is one of the trickiest issues that users and administrators will face.

Grandstream is a major IP phone manufacturer, and customers will no doubt appreciate being able to use the company’s products with Elastix

“Grandstream is proud to extend its partnership with Elastix through the certification of these new products,” said David Li (News - Alert), CEO of Grandstream. “We value our work with Elastix to provide quality and reliable SIP services to their customers throughout Latin America and the world.” He added, “Our new GXP1600 series of Small Business IP Phones make it easier than ever for users to communicate in a quick, clear and efficient way, while our GVC3200 is a powerful and affordable solution for businesses to be more productive by taking advantage of video conferencing.”