VentureVoIP has an interesting story commenting on a recent post on the Trixbox Forum.

As you may know, Trixbox began as Asterisk@Home, and was rebranded Trixbox. Asterisk@Home made use of a configuration tool called AMP (Asterisk Management Portal), currently known as FreePBX, created by Philippe Lindheimer.

Well, Trixbox is distancing themselves from FreePBX, and has moved to create their own GPL forked configuration tool, which is more tightly integrated with Trixbox. Trixbox also cited security concerns, faster bug fixes and improved features as additional reasons for the change. Trixbox has released CE v2.6.2 (build 2.6.0.18), which includes the GPL patch for their integrated version of (formerly) FreePBX, and is currently BETA.

This announcement led to some verbal jousting on the official announcement thread within the Trixbox forums.

Not hard to read between the lines of this one. The team at FreePBX has had growing commercial aspirations of their own over the past year and has made some strategic moves in order to monetize their software tools.

Here are some snippets from the original Trixbox announcement:

…And with the recent decrease of training revenue, it is getting even harder.

Read: FreePBX launched their own Training Seminars which put them in somewhat of a competitive position versus Trixbox’ own FtOCC trainings.

trixbox CE has grown significantly since then, as has FreePBX, once under the reign of Coalescent Systems, then under Rob Thomas and now the trio of James Scanlin (who is the business guy), another partner (who is mainly silent), and the hard-working (yet only single developer!) Philippe Lindheimer.

Read: Trixbox is unhappy with FreePBX’ timeliness of response to bug fixes in conjunction with Trixbox CE. By integrating the FreePBX configuration tool, they are no longer beholden to the FreePBX development team.

And, when we do dutifully report the bugs (in exhausting detail) back to FreePBX we oft get back a request for large tracts of money to fix the bug. Look: we would love to pay large sums of money to FreePBX.

Read: We (Trixbox/Fonality) realize you guys are ambitious…why would we fund you in order to take a run at us?

Perhaps FreePBX is emerging as a potential rival to Trixbox. These impressions are my own, and I don’t claim them to be hard facts. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and to see the reaction from both supporters and detractors within the OSS telephony community.

Just had a surprise visit from the folks at Tortel USA, LLC, whom have a local office in the Buffalo, NY area. I was surprised to learn that they have recently acquired Citel.

If you are not familiar with Citel, they make some unique products that allow businesses with hefty investments in legacy telecommunications gear from Nortel, Avaya and other tier1 vendors to gain the benefits of IP communications without scrapping their digital handsets. Citel’s Portico TVA products facilitate the redeployment of existing digital handsets from 85% of manufacturers, Nortel, NEC and Avaya included. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater any longer, and your existing phones can enjoy a second life in service to a new IP PBX core or IP centrex hosted service such as Broadsoft.

The cost savings incurred by not having to purchase new IP phones when migrating to an IP PBX are huge. In my experience, handsets can often represent the majority portion of the overall expenditure when implementing VoIP.

Another benefit here is not having to retrain all of your employees on the functions of a new IP handset. They gain the UC benefits of a new IP communications platform, but the overall user experience is much more seamless and certainly less traumatic for users.

Tortel has deep roots in the traditional Nortel pbx channel, and this acquisition makes a ton of sense from a standpoint of being able to “hit the ground running”. I spoke with them at length, and came away with a sense that Citel was in the great hands, and likely has a bright future.

The folks at Linksys were nice enough to come visit our offices and teach us more about the features Linksys IP Camera systems have to offer. Ed Draper and Dave Hornstein (filling in for Andrew Lissitz) showed us the importance of IP Camera bundles, Power over Ethernet switches and Network Attached Storage (NAS). The guys displayed a PVC2300 camera and all of the free applications included with the camera.

These included:

• a choice to disable LED lights
• the ability to chose your stream type
• detachable lenses
• creating a recording schedule
• image settings
• stream speed
• full audio
• motion detection settings
• mobile phone streaming

and many others.

Hi everyone,

Just letting you know that we are still having our promotion on free shipping for all Axis IP Cameras and Geovision DVR cards.

Don’t miss out, and as always, let us know if you have any questions at http://www.ipcamerasupply.com.