Matrix IP-PBX, a full featured IP-PBX, is capable of interoperability Yealink IP-Phones. Matrix IP-PBX is capable of handling voice and video calls over IP network besides centralized call control and media relay services. The open-standard SIP protocol support makes it suitable for interoperability with SIP proxies, gateways and various make IP-Phones. Matrix IP-PBX offers benefits of reduced communication costs, seamless connectivity and simplified management even to remote users and geographically dispersed branches.

“The Interoperability testing area included basic call management features, advanced enterprise grade features and complete feature transparency between IP-PBX and IP-Phones. Matrix IP-PBX with Yealink IP-Phone portfolio – An affordable and feature rich solution-mix for SMBs, SMEs and large enterprises will enhance the customer satisfaction and will ensure the long term business opportunities.” Sajeev Nair, Manager-Product Management for Matrix said.

Yealink IP-Phones support SIP standard and are equipped with efficient voice chipset and voice engine to offer better quality and high definition voice. Yealink IP-Phones embed rich features including auto-provision, PoE, security protocols and support for range of voice codecs.

“Cooperation with Indian local IP PBX manufacturer like Matrix Comsec is very important to us,” said Stone Lu, vice president of Yealink, “It represents strength of Yealink to keep a foothold in Indian broad market as well as ensures that our mutual Indian customers will get a dependable and easy-to-use solution available for connecting people in new ways, anytime, anywhere.”

About Matrix Comsec

Matrix Comsec is a leader in Telecom and Security solutions for modern businesses and enterprises, featuring an extensive product line that includes IP-Phones, Gateways and Terminals. Matrix has launched cutting-edge telecom products like IP-PBX, IP-Servers, Universal Gateways, VoIP Gateways and Terminals, GSM FCTs, GSM Gateways, Access Control, Time-Attendance Systems and Fire Alarm Systems through its designing and manufacturing competencies. Matrix has a diverse customer base ranging from manufacturing units and corporations to the hospitality industry, and a global presence through more than 500 channel partners. To find out more about Matrix’s products and to learn more about the various solutions offered by Matrix to optimize business processes through effective communication solutions, visit the company website, www.MatrixComSec.com

About Yealink

Yealink is a professional designer and manufacturer of IP phones and video phones for the world-wide broadband telephony market. Yealink products are fully compatible with the SIP industry standard, and have broad interoperability with the major IP-PBX, softswitch and IMS on the market today. For more information, please visit: http://www.yealink.com.

Source : Matrix Telecom

Parallels, more famous in web hosting world for its “Plesk” web control panel, has launched hosted PBX services too on 23rd Feb 2011, as per press there press release. They will provide Hosted PBX solutions, as well as support for Microsoft Office 365 Syndication and Hyper-V Cloud. It is also increasing its investment in facilitating APS-enabled solutions to accelerate ISV’s ability to also profit from the cloud.

Parallels announces Hosted PBX

According to ‘Parallels SMB Cloud Insights’ (U.S. 2010); small and medium business (SMB) cloud consumption has hit the mass adoption curve with the cloud services market valued at $10.6 billion in 2010. This market opportunity will increase to $28.6 billion and small businesses with fewer than 100 employees are the foundation of this market. They account for over 80% of the total market spending and over 95% of all U.S. SMBs.

“SMBs cloud consumption has hit the wide adoption curve and driving a sea change in the cloud industry,” said Birger Steen, CEO of Parallels. “They are demanding a trusted, full service provider to deliver the integrated and complete portfolio of IT services they need. Today, there aren’t many that can provide the full service offering or keep up with the increasing expectations from their customers. Partnering is the only way service providers will meet the growing needs of SMB and stay competitive.”

Service providers need to adjust to remain competitive in the industry as SMBs are asking their traditional IT providers for cloud services, driving new, well-funded, entrants into the market. The service provider must offer a full set of integrated services to grow profit and reduce churn. With the right partners they can do that and can continue to drive efficiency accelerating growth through reinvestment.

For complete press release.

Here is a very good article about choosing on premise or hosted PBX for your business written by Bryan Johns
Digium Community Director :-

In advance of a planned panel discussion on this topic at IT Expo in Miami next month, I decided to take a moment to formalize my thoughts on the merits of both the hosted and premises PBX deployment models. At risk of coming off as indecisive, I am going to go ahead and say that there are arguments both for and against hosted and premises solutions that depend heavily upon customer size, needs, network infrastructure, planned use and growth forecasts. Generally, the way in which these variables come together supplies the best determination as to which deployment model makes the most sense and why. Let’s take a minute to look at that assumption in more detail. Full Article Here.

Startup Introduces Free Business Class PBX Systems for SMBs

SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 28 — InVox, a leading provider of business telephony solutions, today announced the launch of its free hosted business phone system service PBXPlus, for startups and SMBs. InVox’s mission is to provide feature-rich business telephone systems and enable productive business telephony using the latest speech technologies with this release of their latest product.

With PBXPlus, setting up a phone system is quick and easy using the patent pending drag-and-drop visual designer which eliminates the need for the user to know technical details of phone systems. PBXPlus is cloud-based, which allows users to access and change the phone system settings from any computer with Internet connection.

“Most SMBs need a simple and powerful phone system in few clicks with no additional learning curve,” says Manohar Chapalamadugu, CEO of InVox. “Voice applications involving speech recognition are traditionally reserved for organizations with large budgets. PBXPlus now offers several value added voice solutions and out-of-the-box integrations with popular third party services to increase caller satisfaction and employee productivity.”

Just like Google Voice for consumers, PBXPlus is offering numbers in the US and UK for businesses bundled with advanced business class features for free. Businesses can now get a free number with unlimited extensions, unlimited inbound calls, unlimited call forwarding, voicemail, transcription, and speech recognition. InVox also has a wide range of more than 50 voice applications which can help businesses increase sales, boost employee productivity and enhance seamless communication.

Besides taking advantage of free PBX features, business owners can now add more power to their phone systems by adding voice applications and featured 3rd party integrations for a fraction of the industry standard. The ready-made voice applications include integrations with Salesforce, Google Talk, Skype, MSN Live, Google Calendar, Zoho, Sugar, Intuit and most payment gateways.

About InVox

InVox is an international company that provides ready-to-use voice systems for businesses. Their goal is to empower businesses to design and manage their speech applications. InVox easily integrates with widely used business applications and services such as Salesforce, Intuit, Skype and Google Calendar. With headquarters in Silicon Valley and development in India, we work around the clock to service our global customers. Visit us on the Web at http://www.InVox.com.

SOURCE InVox

Normally, one should check out three steps for buying EPABX or PBX for their office as follows :

1. Requirement Analysis
2. Benefits of PBX System
3. Choice of PBX Company

1. Requirement Analysis
a. Find out how many people should be speaking within the office premises at any point of time as well as how many people need a dedicated telephone connection.
b. If you make lot of outgoing calls then, most probably, you need LCR ( Least Cost Routing) to minimise recurring telephone bill.
c. Depending on power supply condition in your office area, decide on suitable battery backup.
d. Do you need IVR or CTI applications using which you may be able to automate office calls.

2. Benefits of PBX System
a. Decide how incoming calls would be attended by office staff.
b. How many long distance calls are being made or are there any misuse of this. EPABX is capable of restricting long distance calls depending of seniority of staff.
c. How to integrate CTI with your CRM software if you have any.

3. Choice of PBX Company

a. Buy PBX only from authorised distributor or dealer of PBX manufacturer. This will ensure support and service as well as new PBX equipment with proper warranty.
b. Ask for reference and any benchmarking of working of the PBX model you decide upon.

Coral Telecom is famous for its IRIS series of PBX systems which are high end PBX systems with high capacity and high cost as well along with its size! Iris Lite is another product which is the compact version both in terms of size and budget, but not in terms of features!

IRIS LITE PBX from Coral Telecom

It is built around “powerful 32 Bit ARM processor with fully distributed architecture not allowing not only faster processing but also optimum utilization of main CPU time.” It inherits all powerful and useful feature from IRIS switch.

Few of the interesting features are :-

1. IP Cloud Connectivity

VOIP Card can be installed to give direct connectivity to IP cloud(SIP/H-323) from its any analog extension. It uses standard CODEC with in-built echo canceler.

2. ISDN “U” Interface

Extends ISDN “U” Bus on a Single pair of copper wire upto a distance of 5 Km from the PBX. All standard ISDN Equipment such as ISDN Phones, Video Conferencing equipment, etc., can be connected to it using NT 1. This is useful in building voice and data network within remote factories/sites/offices scattered around large geographical area.

3. Conferencing

It ha up to 128 Party Conference , both supervised or unsupervised. It can involve external lines, SIP connections. The capacity of the conference connections can be configured.

4. Railway E&M Trunk support

It has support for Railway 2/4W E&M support. It provides direct connectivity between railway phone to outside PSTN network.

5. CTI Application

It has very useful CSTA support which gives any CTI applications many powerful features. It has ANI, DNI, Call Progress report etc.

IRIS LITE is low cost, value for money yet, very powerful and feature rich on premise PBX system. Organisation who need feature rich and powerful, yet within budget and scope for many upgradation, IRIS LITE is an ideal choice.

While on premise and legacy hardware based PBX systems still rule PBX market in India, but there are may companies who are providing Asterisk based, software based and feature rich EPABX services in India. I thought it would be useful to list them here. This is not the complete list for obvious reason and I would like to request every one, kindly to leave a comment with any Asterisk based PBX company whose name are missing here:-

1. iTecs Communications
Bangalore based company with range of IP-PBX based products. They also provide all kind of Asterisk support, customisation.

2. Altavista Technologies
This Hyderabad based company has offices in other metros too. It provides Asterisk based PBX as well as Asterisk support and customisation.

3. Lintel Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Another Hyderabad based company with office in Ahemdabad, Gujarat. They provide IP-PBX based on Asterisk.

4. Open VoIPS
A multinational company with operations in India. They provide complete Asterisk based PBX services.

5. Drishti-Soft Solutions (India)
Drishti Solutions has Asterisk based PBX, VoIP services, IVR etc. They are very well known IP Call center, Contact center provider in India.

6. Peopletech System Private Ltd.
Premium Asterisk PBX provider. They have many telecom and voice products including IVR, Voice logger, bulk voice messages etc.

7. e-Horizons Soft Tech Pvt. Ltd
Delhi based company with many PBX and telecom products like ACD, Auto Dialer, Voice logger etc.

I will be updating the list with more companies.

Matrix Telecom, an well-known PBX brand in India, has a range of PBX system specially designed for hospitality industries. It has hotel EPABX starting from 16 lines to 516 lines. The models like ETERNITY ME16S, ETERNITY ME10S, ETERNITY GE12S etc. are feature rich as well as suits any kind of modern hotel and many hotel specific features.

Most probably, Matrix Telecom Solution is the only PABX manufacturer in India which manufacture PBX range exclusively for hospitality industry. Many other PBX manufacturer in India provide hotel functionality in the form of additional module in the same general purpose PABX machine.

Few of the interesting and hotel specific features of Matrix Hospitality EPABXs are :-

1. Back Ground Music / Ringback tone

This is an interesting feature which allows external audio source like CD player etc. be connected. t becomes hold-music as well as caller ring back tone when a music is being played.

2. Emergency Call Detection and Reporting

Emergency calls like Police, Fire etc. are automatically detected and reported. It has also option for starting a hooter during such emergency thereby alerting everyone in the hotel.

3. Floor Service Destination(s)

This is another useful and interesting feature of Matrix Hotel EPABX which is very useful in a multi-storied hotel. It allows calls by rooms to land on the ‘room service’ number on the same floor.

4. GSM, VoIP and T1/E1 Connectivity

These facilities offer value added service to guests in a hotel where they may get benefits of least cost routing for making both mobile calls as well as international calls.

5. Voice Guidance on Tones

This is unique features built into Matrix Hotel PBXes. This feature is like IVR which can guide guests with recorded voice. For example, if any guest dial room service and room service number is busy, then it can play a message like, this number is busy, please press 1 if you want this number to call you back!

Apart from these features, it also has all the hotel specific features in it. Matrix Hospitality PBX are quite popular in India and they have large installations. Hotels which are looking for EPABX specially suitable for their hotels, Matrix Hospitality PBX systems are good choice!

What is Call Whisper ?

Call whisper, also known as call screening, is an advanced PBX feature for incoming calls which allows called party to know in voice which number caller has dialed. During ringing and before call s established, called party is “whispered” or informed in voice about the caller as well as what number the caller has dialed.
After hearing these information, the called party can either accept the call, or reject the call, or transfer the call to any other extension.

In a scenario, where call is routed to a single extension from different phone numbers, this feature is very useful. It allows the called party to know, which number the calling party has dialed, since every number may correspond to different department of the organisation or any other specific type of calls. The dialed number identification help the called party greet the calling party accordingly.

This call whispering can be a built in feature in PABX or this can also be implemented using CTI software. Many advanced PABX comes with Call Whisper or Call screening feature. Matrix Solution, a premium PBX manufacturer in India, offers this feature in their hotel PBX models like ETERNITY GE12S.

Call Whisper is also useful in measuring effectiveness of advertising where one receptionist or extension is receives calls from different brands from different numbers, but terminated in single telephone extension.

The message which is played for the called party in Call Whisper feature can be customised and recorded using telephones. When using Call whisper, there can be many intelligent conditions and message playing as well as call routing.

Call whisper also offers the called party a facility to reject an incoming call and then to transfer the call to voice mail number. This kind of facility will allow receptionist to sort and attend more calls as per urgency of the incoming calls.

Call whispering feature is desired in a PABX where optimisation of manpower usage as well as informed customer care is required. So, it is recommended that while buying an high-end PABX, one should buy a PBX with call whispering feature.

There are many words which are specific to PBX or PABX, or widely used in PABX industry. I thought I would try to list them :

1. PABX, PBX, EPABX
2. ISDN
3. PRI
4. Line card
5. Power supply
6. Number of ports
7. number of lines
8. trunk
9. network
10. master
11. slave
12. clock
13. trace
14. call trace
15. log
16. CDR
17. ACD
18. SS7
19. Analog
20. POTS
21. exchange
22. Telephone
23. Intercom
24. R2MF
25. MDF
26. TRUNK
27. Junction Box
28. PCM
29. E1
30. T1

To be updated !