TBPro Announcement

Trixboxers,
Today we are excited to announce the release of the next evolution of the trixbox product family. This is such an important release that we felt compelled to add some background color before our announcement.

The Future of trixbox CE
The future of trixbox CE is very safe. trixbox CE is our baby and it always will be. This means that we will continue to invest more money and engineers each quarter into this platform. In fact, we have big plans for trixbox CE with last week’s updated 2.2.4 release and the new 2.4 (2.3 beta 1) release featuring CentOS 5, Asterisk 1.4, and FreePBX 2.3. The next major version after that should really take the CE world to a new level. Again, trixbox CE IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE! ;)

Looking Back
Before we get to the meat of this announcement, let’s turn the clock back a couple of years and take a look at how this all started. Andrew Gillis, working in his basement home office had been playing with Asterisk, AMP, Flash Operator Panel and other tools and, like many of us, was frustrated with what a pain it was to get everything working simply and easily. To solve this, he created the Asterisk@Home project that enabled us early adopters to rapidly build systems without all the manual work. This opened up Asterisk to many people who may have never have used because they didn’t’ have the time or technical acumen to install everything from source.

As the AAH product evolved, it became clear that many people were building businesses around Asterisk@Home and it was time to take it to the next level and provide faster improvements, more features, and paid support options to users. At this point the project was acquired by Fonality (who changed its name to “trixbox”) in order to fund the development and support options. trixbox has since become the de facto standard for Asterisk PBX deployments today.

Recently, you may have noticed that “trixbox” was subtly renamed to “trixbox CE” – the CE stands for “Community Edition”. Why the change? Well, we felt that trixbox, even with all of its features and ease is still somewhat difficult for people who don’t have deep Linux or Asterisk knowledge. We also noticed that even the best of you would run into problems supporting your customers as you starting rolling 10 or 100 trixbox deployments. The first few go fine, but eventually you end up running around acting as consultants, which eats into your time to actually gain customers and revenue.

It has become clear to us that as the trixbox community matures, it needs a fully supportable commercial solution which has been lab-tested at scale, has automatic software updates built into it, and requires minimal knowledge of Linux or Asterisk. Until today, our only answer to this has been PBXtra which is sold as a complete solution bundled with server, line cards, and phones. But, as good as PBXtra is, we felt it was not a great solution for today’s dataVARs.

In short, there has been a big hole between the 100% bundled approach of PBXtra and the do-it-yourself approach of trixbox CE.
Well, today we are announcing the immediate availability of the next evolution of the trixbox product line…trixbox Pro!

Let us give you some highlights about trixbox Pro:

1. trixbox Pro is built upon the stable PBXtra Core, which contains a hardened version of Asterisk 1.2x. We have spent 4 years hardening this Core and now have it deployed in 2,000 businesses in 37 countries.
2. There are a total of 1,300,000 lines of code in the trixbox Pro solution. Compare that to the 200,000 lines of code inside of Asterisk and you will understand just how busy we have been.
3. trixbox Pro is a software-only product. This means you supply the servers, cards, and phones. This means you make the profit from these items. This also means that you can quickly add phones for your customers in the field.
4. trixbox Pro is a reseller product. This means it has discounts of up to 50% for resellers. It also means that we provide training, collateral, presentations and the tools you need to sell.
5. trixbox Pro is re-brandable on the fly. With a few clicks in the trixbox Pro Admin Panel you can skin this thing to look like a jelly bean.
6. trixbox Pro starts with a FREE version.
7. trixbox Pro uses Fonality’s patented “hybrid-hosted” technology. This means that our data center knows about problems before your customers do. In many cases our software is able to self-heal (Asterisk crashes, deadlocks, etc.) In some cases, our support group is able to proactively contact you (RAID failure, CPU problems, disk storage capacity issues, etc.)
8. trixbox Pro uses Fonality’s patented “hybrid-hosted” technology which means that your config files (*.conf) are backed up to our data center with every change you make. This means our support group can restore your configurations rapidly. Note: we do *not* backup your audio files for privacy reasons.
9. Our hybrid-hosted approach let’s us respond rapidly, on your behalf, to security issues within Linux, SIP, Asterisk, or your phone’s firmware. This means that if a global patch comes out for a distro, we can patch it for you very quickly.
10. Using a patented approach, our hybrid-hosted approach makes setting up remote and telecommuter phones a breeze, even when behind a static IP address. No need for Session Border Controllers, STUN, TURN or ICE. Let our data center act as your remote phone’s registration authority.
11. Lots of new cool features such as: SMS alerts, advanced queue/agent graphs, easy VoIP setup, auto-line-card configuration, real time status graphs, one-touch branch office-linking, advanced Web User Panel, extension groups, voicemail groups, department permissions, zone intercom, trunk status pages, domain name branding, skills based routing, web-based recordings, agents on cell phones, and dozens more!

There is much more information about trixbox Pro at our brand new website: http://www.trixbox.com and we encourage you to go read about it to learn the difference between the FREE version of trixbox Pro and the paid versions. Take a look -- you might be surprised at how a commercial version of trixbox might just benefit your telephony practice.

As we have always said, trixbox has always been “about choice” and we believe that the three new trixbox Pro products are pretty interesting choices.

That being said, we gotta get back to work on launching trixbox CE 2.4 (beta) which should be killer!

Andrew Gillis & Kerry Garrison