Talking with Ivar Plahte, CEO, OnRelay

By: Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

OnRelay (News - Alert) (www.onrelay.com) is a privately held unified communications software company focused on cellular fixed mobile convergence. The company recently launched Mobile PBX (News - Alert), a global private mobile branch exchange (OnRelay MBX) that utilizes open source. Yours Truly recently talked about this latest product with OnRelay’s CEO, Ivar Plahte (News - Alert).

RG: What is OnRelay’s Unified MBX and how does it leverage Open Source?

IP: OnRelay’s Unified MBX software is a Mobile PBX — a complete IP communications system built for mobile phones. Unified MBX provides businesses with a stand-alone unified telephony system, while bringing all the IP PBX functionality to the mobile phone. Unified MBX allows companies to deploy IP communications without any of the expense of proprietary telephony hardware, IP PBX licenses or desk phones. By replacing wired business communications with cellular, companies save up to 80 percent of the cost of IPT. However, Unified MBX can fully support desk phones and softphones when required by the end-user.

We developed Unified MBX to meet the need of our service provider partners for a cost-effective, easily deployable mobile PBX solution for SMBs and mobile work groups. They needed a solution which could be hosted in their networks and provided as SaaS (News - Alert), or deployed on customer premises on a standard server. In both cases, the solution had to be scalable, intuitive to the end user, and available at a SMB price point.

For over a year, OnRelay’s development team explored the options to meet these requirements. We integrated our established Cellular FMC software with a number of potential PBX candidates, including Microsoft OCS — and these tests, together with our nine-year history of supporting proprietary boxes from Cisco, Nortel (News - Alert), Siemens and Avaya, led us to look at open source. We found that open source PBXs, in particular sipXecs IP PBX, had reached a level of maturity, scalability and feature-richness to rival, and in sipXecs’ case exceed, that of closed systems. By choosing open source, our customers could benefit from advanced IP functionalities, continually added to and refined by a strong open source community, without having to spend on IP PBX licenses.

We chose sipXecs IP PBX for the product, and provide this pre-integrated with our established Cellular FMC software. What we’ve therefore achieved in Unified MBX is a balance between proprietary FMC technology and open source to meet market need. Our customers download a complete bundle of Cellular FMC software, sipXecs, and Linux OS behind a single install shield. sipXecs provides the UC telephony server, and all the key features of an advanced PBX, and our Cellular FMC technology makes this mobile. The only hardware required is a standard server or VMware instance.

Since 2001, OnRelay’s technology has allowed companies to replace deskphones with mobile phones. Now by combining this with the open source sipXecs IP PBX, we allow companies to replace all their telephony hardware with hosted software.

RG: Given the many alternatives out there, why did you pick sipXecs for the open source IP PBX?

IP: We chose sipXecs IP PBX after careful prototyping. SipXecs came out on top in four key areas: SIP-compliancy; ease of use; feature-richness; and scalability. As the only 100 percent SIP-compliant open source IP PBX, sipXecs offers a very different architecture to Asterisk (News - Alert). In my view, Asterisk was developed to perform as a traditional centralized PBX. SipXecs offers the more forward-facing approach, using SIP to facilitate a peer-to-peer architecture between end-points. For the customer, this means that sipXecs needs less server power — sipXecs media traffic does need not go through one centralized server, so that server can be quite small and needs only handle SIP signaling and some media storage like voicemail.

What SIP-compliancy means to OnRelay is that we can offer a mobile PBX solution to be hosted by mobile operators, as well as fixed. By combining our solution with SIP-based mobile VPNs, operators can host FMC services, while keeping all voice media traffic in their network (rather than it having to trombone through the customer PBX). Only the data signaling passes into the PBX, so the customer avoids all fixed-to-mobile and mobile-to-fixed termination charges. And SipXecs’s ease of use is notable both in installation and ongoing management of the system. We’ve supported the install of Unified MBX entirely remotely for customers in Europe and Asia-Pac. We’ve found end-users able to manage their own profiles through the powerful web-based management system. Maturity and feature-richness are two strengths provided by SIPfoundry (News - Alert) (www.sipfoundry.org), the open source community behind sipXecs. Over 400 features are listed on the sipXecs IP PBX wiki http://sipx-wiki.calivia.com/index.php/The_sipXecs_IP_PBX_Feature_List.

Finally, we required scalability. SipXecs is the only open source PBX able to scale to large corporate deployments with several branch offices, and we have successfully tested over 1,000 extensions without any limitations. According to the SIPfoundry site, the largest known installation serves 6,000-plus users connected to one redundant (HA) system. Our engineers believe that the platform has the potential to scale further. IT

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