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January 16, 2015

Patton SmartNode Open Gateway Appliance Offers First-in-its-Class Features for SMB Market


By Steve Anderson
Contributing TMCnet Writer

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Making tools for the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market can be a difficult task. SMBs are a wholly different animal from major enterprise operations, and have demands specific to the class that can't always be solved by off-the-shelf consumer-grade material. But when an SMB tool can be effectively built, it's often well-received. Patton Electronics, meanwhile, illustrated this point quite well with its new SmartNode Open Gateway (News - Alert) Appliance (SNOGA), which is, at last report, now shipping.


The SNOGA represents a major industry first: an open hardware platform for IP telephony developers, which allows said developers to work in Linux or Windows-based hardware to create the perfect, customized environment in unified communications (UC) or business phone systems. The SNOGA is particularly geared to work for businesses that need capacity sufficient to handle between two and 128 concurrent voice or fax calls.

With the SNOGA platform, a variety of additional tools can be brought into play, ranging from call recording systems to interactive voice response (IVR) systems to call accounting systems and beyond, including even enterprise session border controller (E-SBC) functions.  Better yet, that extreme level of customization capability allows for a variety of different use cases, and offices from law firms to body shops can put its power to work, making it perfect for a large portion of the SMB market. SmartNode product manager Bret Patton (News - Alert), meanwhile, offered up some comment around the release, saying “Patton is changing the landscape for application developers. The door is open right now for partners in the open-source engineering community.”

Already the SNOGA system has won acclaim; it recently took the 2015 Product of the Year designation from Internet Telephony (News - Alert) magazine, and the SNOGA itself comes with Patton's Gold-Standard Free Support at no extra charge. Those who want even better coverage, meanwhile, can step up to Patton's Platinum-Plus Premium 24 / 7 Support, and those interested in trying the system out can check into Patton's offer of demo units for qualified partners looking to do proof-of-concept testing. Those with a concern about quality, meanwhile, need not be; Patton offers not only upstream quality of service (QoS), but also Patton's own DownStreamQoS to make sure that quality is sound throughout.

Developing for SMBs, as noted previously, can be difficult due to the wider variety of uses involved. Some will need the ability to field a large number of relatively short calls, while others will need smaller numbers of longer calls. With call volumes varying wildly over the course of a day, building one unit to address the SMB crowd can be a tall order. But Patton, meanwhile, seems to have developed the Swiss Army Knife-style system of an SMB information technology (IT) staffer's dream. The sheer amount of versatility here speaks well toward this system's overall capability, and should make a terrific recommendation for anyone looking to augment calling systems and make the move into session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking systems.

It's going to be interesting to see just what kind of impact this has on the wider market, but with all those features working on its behalf, it's likely to have plenty of value to it indeed.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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