OnRelay embraces open source - with a surprise

OnRelay's IP PBX/mobile UC solution has moved to an open source platform and will be offered as a lower-cost hosted product. The company's use of sipX is an interesting surprise and likely to give warm fuzzies to Nortel, which bought sipX parent Pingtel less than a month ago.

In an interview earlier this week, CEO Ivar Plahte said the new platform allows OnRelay to offer its product at an affordable price points to the small to medium-sized enterprise. "The weakness of the IP Centrex model is that it's too cookie cutter," he said. "We can be the mobile PBX rather than the IP PBX."

OnRelay's MBX product is essentially a PBX for mobile phones, using a patented solution to autonomously route all incoming and outgoing mobile calls through an office phone system (hosted or managed). Plahte said that MBX can also incorporate desktop phones into its service, but his personal prejudice is to an all-mobile environment.

The new open source-based hosted MBX product is at a price point where a smaller service provider or an Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP) could simply throw a 1U appliance in a rack and start offering a PBX solution to a group of mobile users. "We think there's an opportunity for more lightweight, next gen telcos," Plahte said. "The model is more of an internet type. With a low entry cost, [a service provider] can put up a Linux server for the first customer, then continue to build customers."

OnRelay started reviewing options for a lower cost solution over a year ago, including Microsoft OCS and sipX. "We looked at [sipX] very carefully," Plathe stated. "It's a good piece of software, we had few problems integrating to it." 

Plathe also discussed the implications of Nortel owning the Pingtel development team and controlling the future of sipX. "It's a double-edged sword in a way," said Plathe. "There's a benefit, a serious commitment, serious R&D on open source. Nortel continues to support open source platforms...The risk is Nortel starts acting like Nortel again, an anti-partner, very closed, very telco, Bellhead organization." Still, Plathe believes that Nortel will continue to embrace open source and move the sipX platform forward.

For more:
- OnRelay embraces open source. Release [1]

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