Digium Releases Switchvox 6

Digium has announced the release of the latest version of its IP-based private branch exchange (PBX), Switchvox.

Now up to version six, Switchvox has gained a number of upgrades and is now ready to tackle the business world alongside VMware vSphere, a cloud computing virtualization operating system. Having attained VMware Ready certification, this means Digium can now take advantage of VMware’s virtualization and disaster recovery while still giving their customers everything they need for unified communications in Switchvox and in Asterisk, its communications application development framework.

Adam Kramer, a product manager at Digium, commented on this release and the application’s new capabilities.

“At Digium, we strive to offer our customers tools to empower their communications,” Kramer said. “The release of Switchvox 6 marks a milestone in the evolution of Switchvox by leveraging the capabilities in the latest version of Asterisk and the ongoing contributions of the Asterisk community to introduce new, powerful features. Switchvox 6 enables the use of a new, real-time engine that opens the door to more advanced integrations such as Salesforce.com and other CRM tools.”

Switchvox now brings to the table a number of features that tie in to VMware, Asterisk, and well-known customer relationship management (CRM) tools. It begins to assist businesses with its in-house relationship to Asterisk, which provides a cloud-based platform for efficiently handling calls and now, with the release of Asterisk 13, and updated dashboard that seeks to provide increased visibility of all calls flowing through an organization. Asterisk also provides the backbone of analytics that managers can study to improve customers experiences as their businesses move forward.

Coming back to VMware, vSphere’s ability to scale with a client’s growth and to provide disaster recovery should not be underrated. Its management of cloud resources can give IT administrators the tools they need to quickly adjust the flow of resources Switchvox demands. During the day, when call volume fluctuates up and down, admins can plan for those events. And when they see the entire organization growing to meet customer demand, they can dial up the volume to meet that overall need too.

Finally, Switchvox’s link to CRM tools may find itself overshadowed by the previously noted upgrades, but this is one feature that businesses will be sure to enjoy. Especially in call centers, CRM applications like Salesforce have no equal in the benefits they provide. They give users quick access to a host of information about each individual customer as each customer enters the equation. They can sort users into groups for easy access during sales; they can even link to dialers to automate the calling process for outbound operations. All together, CRM places a capstone on the upgrades to this feature set that Digium has just revealed.

Edited by Maurice Nagle