A London-based software company that calls itself a “pioneer” in mobile PBX (News - Alert) this week announced that it’s supporting an open source platform that’s designed to provide low-cost business VoIP with mobile extensions.

 

Officails at OnRelay (News - Alert) say their Hosted MBX with sipXecs will allow businesses to create a mobile office communication system without investing in desk phones, proprietary PBXx or cabling.

 

The company’s chief executive officer, Ivar Plahte (News - Alert), told TMCnet in an interview today that as IP-PBXs are becoming commoditized, OnRelay sees the use of open source products as a “great way to create a very low cost and easily deployable PBX offering for the SMEs.”

 

“The use of open source PBXs as a platform for MBX also has the huge benefit that when problems or faults are found in the PBX software itself, OnRelay can immediately fix these and commit fixes to the open source project,” Plahte told TMCnet. “With proprietary PBXs it may take months or years to get such faults fixed, costing OnRelay massive R&D overheads from expensive and time consuming workarounds.”

 

While OnRelay’s MBX server remains non-open source, the company now finds itself participating in the open source community and committing code changes, Plahte said, as well as bug fixes and tools to the open source PBX projects that may benefit other organizations.

 

Officials describe sipXecs as a stable and scalable VoIP open source system built for enterprise users. The SIP-based solution includes features such as active directory integration, presence and Microsoft exchange support. SipXecs uses Internet techniques and a distributed architecture to ensure a highly secure IP voice system, according to the company.

 

For Plahte, the key proposition of Hosted MBX is to allow SMEs to deploy a low cost, fully functional and real PBX system without having to add a single hardware component or IP deskphone to their network.

 

“SipXecs is a far more functional and flexible system than alternative centrex offerings, and allows smaller, aggressive software telcos service providers to enter the market with low up front investments,” Plahte told TMCnet. “Customer data from MBX implementations has shown that over 70 percent of all calls to the PBX are answered by the person being called, causing vastly more responsive organizations. The normal rule of thumb metric for PBXs is that one out of five business calls are answered.”

 

The separation of business and personal numbers and calls is also a great flexible working and control benefit for both management and employees, Plahte said.

 

“MBX allows end users to use their PBX number for all business calls and their personal mobile number for all personal calls,” he said. “End-users can switch off mobile work calls when they desire. The business can ensure ex employees do not take their corporate contact numbers with them when they leave.”

 

The technology has gained significant traction. According to Ovum’s (News - Alert) practice leader for mobile, Jeremy Green, many SMEs have been reluctant in the past to consider mobile-only strategy for telephone extensions, because they’ve been concerned that the functionality of existing PBX add-ons and hosted platforms didn’t offer them the controls and tools that they needed.

 

However, Green said, “New developments in this market mean that mobile-only strategy is worth a second look.”

 

And, according to Plahte, fourth-generation mobile PBXs may replace IP-PBXs in the enterprise domain, especially because they’re characterized hardware, rather than software-based servers.

 

“Voice traffic is carried by public mobile networks rather than private corporate VoIP LANs,” Plahte said. “Smart mobile phones are used as the primary or only PBX extension for a majority of users.”

 

For Plahte, today’s IP PBX market is similar to the UNIX market of the early 1990s.

 

“A limited number of vendors, vertical value chains, and a tight coupling of hardware, system software and applications,” Plahte said. “OnRelay expects Mobile PBXs to disrupt IP PBXs in much the same way that Internet enabled PCs client server technologies disrupted Open Systems or UNIX in the computer networking market. In this context it is also interesting to note how much older TDM PBXs resemble the computer Mainframes of the 70s and 80s.”