There’s always a tradeoff when it comes to open source software. On the one hand, there are no license fees. On the other, however, there often is inadequate support when it comes to setting up and making sure the software is reliable and ready for production use.

That’s part of the play for Hiper PBX (News - Alert), an IP PBX solutions provider that primarily serves the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Peru and Uruguay markets.

Corporate telephone networks connect via private branch exchange (PBX), and Hiper PBX helps customers deploy modern business telephone systems based on internet protocol (IP) technology. Because these systems run over the Internet, they can include features such as unified communications and a slew of advanced features such as automatic call forwarding.

Hiper PBX builds its solutions around the Asterisk (News - Alert) PBX, a popular and full-featured open-source PBX solution. This allows Hiper PBX to offer its customers a lower price point without skimping on advanced featured.

“Open source lets us enter the market very fast, because our channel partners can distribute cheaper solutions for phones, but with the assurance of our engineers,” Hiper PBX sales director Gustavo Scheveloff told TMCnet during ITEXPO Miami this past January.

That assurance is big, because it gives customers the advantages of open source technology with the support of Hiper PBX.

“We assure that the open source telephones we use in our solutions are first-rate from our engineering team,” he added.

The company’s CP-3000 IP PBX, for instance, which supports up to 500 extensions, supports SIP, H.323 and IAX2 protocols; trunk support for SIP, H323 and IAX accounts; remote extensions support; call forward, transference and conference support; personalized dial plan, voicemail to e-mail functionality, personalized IVR, and cluster configuration support for high availability, among other features.

In addition to offering more bang for the buck, leveraging Asterisk means they are offering their customers an open platform with room for custom modifications.

“They can use their own modifications. But, with our call center that is centralized, they can check all these modifications and we have the control to offer the customer the professional services and maintenance to ensure that the company has good support,” he noted.

Using open source as the backbone of its IP PBX appliances, Hiper PBX must content with competitors who also are built off of the open source solution. But Scheveloff said that what sets his company apart from the rest is that it goes beyond just the appliance.

“We not only focus on the development of the appliance, we also focus on the rest of the products in the solution,” he said.

“We focus on,” he added, “the telephone stage, the infrastructure stage, and the security stage.”

The full interview with Gustavo Scheveloff can be found above.