Dell Computers (www.dell.com) has selected Fonality (www.fonality.com) as their partner and will start selling IP PBXes targeted at SMBs loaded with Fonality’s software and Sangoma (www.sangoma.com) boards.

“This was a win that didn’t come easy or fast,” said Fonality CEO Chris Lyman. “We’ve been working with Dell for over a year now. Dell certainly didn’t start with Fonality, they started with a list of requirements they needed to fill in order to go to market. We fit the bill.”

The Fonality PBX is being delivered on the Dell OptiPlex 330 desktop server. It is being sold exclusively by Dell directly and through their reseller channels; an appearance in Dell’s paper mail catalogs is expected later this year. A total of four SKUs have been set up, only differentiated in terms of the type of connectivity it will have. All boxes will support 50 concurrent phone calls and up to 150 extensions. One SKU is for VoIP only, one for analog, one for PRI, and one for PRI+Analog.

Dell will also sell the Aastra 4 and Aastra 9 series of IP phones, along with Polycom’s IP 4000 Soundstation SIP Conference phone (www.polycom.com). “We write very very tight integration to Aaastra and Polycom,” said Lyman. “We needed to use the phone sets Dell is selling to get full SIP integration.”

The solution includes what Lyman described as “True autodiscovery, complete touchless autoprovisioning.” Users will simply have to plug in and boot up the server, then plug in the appropriate model SIP phone into the Ethernet network; the server automatically configures the phone and assigns it the next available extension.

Fonality’s solution is based upon the Asterisk open source code base, with four years of the company’s own software development on top of it. “They specifically chose us for the hybrid-hosted architecture,” said Lyman. “One of the things they specifically liked about our architecture, it eliminates a lot of the truck rolls that happen in the space.”

“Dell came at this with three prerequisites. One, they wanted it affordable. Two, they wanted it to be really easy to install. Three, they wanted it to run on a Dell PC and they wanted it to be standards based. Since telecom has been really expensive, really proprietary, really complicated, you can see how we got a seat at the table.”

During the call, Lyman indicated that Dell has teamed with Nortel to supply solutions for businesses with over 150 extensions.