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February 12, 2015

Sangoma Schmoozes and Talks UC and SBCs for SMBs at ITEXPO East


By Peter Bernstein
Senior Editor

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Only days after IP hardware and software components provider Sangoma Technologies (News - Alert) closed its deal to acquire Schoomze, the primary developer of FreePBX and the manager/sponsor of that open source project, TMC Group Editorial Director, Erik Linask (News - Alert) at ITEXPO East spoke with Kathleen Reed, Director of Marketing and Tony Lewis, VP, Sangoma about the deal (Tony comes from Schmooze) along with some industry trends. 


First as to Schmooze (News - Alert), as can be seen in the interview this was one of those deals that almost fits into the category of a match made in heaven.  Reed, for examples explained that there we a number of motivations including: “Sangoma customers were coming to us for some time for a PBX (News - Alert) solution. The obvious solution for Sangoma was FreePBX.   A lot of our partners work with FreePBX and build on top of it…” She added, that given the millions of installations, Sangoma was very interested in working with the community.

This means a community that already makes significant use of Schmooze’s chargeable, add-on commercial modules, support services, accompanying hardware to complement FreePBX and an integrated SIP trunking service.

As Lewis notes about the acquisition, it was “That Next logical step.” He added that Schmooze had, “Been involved for 6 years and took it (FreePX) to its teenage years. t was time for FreePBX to become an adult, and Sangoma  as a public company, mature company ,well establish and financially sound was a logical fit for Free PBX to go to the next level.”  Plus, he added that iIt was important to Schoomze that they would be coming to a company that really supported OpenSource. “I helped make our decision easier.”

In regards to what’s next for what can best be called the new Sangoma, Reed and Lewis highlighted a couple of areas that should begin to bear fruit quickly.  Reed talked about all the interesting solutions that will come from brindging the gaps between open source and Sangoma’s proprietary installed based, and was excited about the tighter integration possibilities that offers and particularly about tighter integration with Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync. 

Indeed, as Reed says: “We are seeing a lot of that. Lync is a very interesting unified communications solution but it doesn’t necessarily have all of the features of a full PBX. A lot of small businesses run on FreePBX and when you integrate that with Lync there are very interesting solutions that can happen.”  

Lewis discusses the launch of the M3 platform, which is designed as a backend management tool for multi-tenant situations where multiple FreePBXs can be easily managed from a centralized capability.  And, Reed highlighted Sangoma’s push into the low end of the Session Boarder Controller (SBC) market saying, “Every business really needs an SBC if they are running any kind of SIP.”  She added that the new SBC aimed at SMBs is very affordable, can act a firewall for voice and is a full-fledged SBC.  Lewis added that ultimately the nice thing about the new Sangoma is that the next logical move would be to make the SBC part of FreePBX. 

In short, as the video portrays, the Sangoma-Schoomze combination is a good deal and a good deal more.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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