Vocalscape announces that they have released a Load Balancer for Voice over IP (VoIP) systems.

"Vocalscape has developed the Load Balancer to meet our customers' needs," commented Ron McIntyre, President of Vocalscape. "As our customers grow their user base, they will need to add additional servers to handle the higher volume of calls. The Vocalscape Load Balancer will allow them to evenly share the load among multiple servers."

The Vocalscape Load Balancer began as an open source project which was adopted and improved upon by Vocalscape. It was made compliant with Asterisk, a popular open source PBX, and the algorithm was revised to more evenly distribute calls. Previously, the Load Balancer would send calls to a primary server and only when the primary server was overburdened would calls be sent to additional servers. The new algorithm balances the load by evenly distributing the calls between the servers. As an additional benefit, the Load Balancer provides failover capabilities. If a server is not responding, the Load Balancer will route all calls to servers that are functional.

Fonality announces the Fonality trixbox Open Communications Certification (FtOCC) workshop, the first in a series of training and certification courses for the trixbox application platform. trixbox, the largest and fastest growing Asterisk-based platform and community, is quickly becoming the de facto standard for open source telephony. The FtOCC program will provide the tools and knowledge necessary to successfully implement trixbox in a business environment.

“Telephony is in the midst of a sea change and sea changes mean huge opportunity. But capitalizing on opportunity requires training and education,” said Chris Lyman, Fonality founder and CEO. “The FtOCC courses will quickly teach attendees how to begin earning real money from trixbox and Asterisk.”

Digium and Polycom announce a high-quality VoIP solution for small and medium-size businesses that simplifies the technical aspects of purchasing, configuring and deploying a complete VoIP phone system. The integrated solution, featuring the Digium AsteriskNOW software appliance and Polycom SoundPoint IP desktop phones can significantly lower the time and technical expertise needed to deploy a high quality VoIP solution; enabling more small and medium businesses to enjoy the cost savings, enhanced quality and productivity benefits of advanced IP telephony.

The simplified purchasing, configuration and deployment process is enabled by new capabilities in the Digium AsteriskNOW software appliance, including a one-click function called BuyNOW that enables customers to purchase Polycom SoundPoint IP phones, and an intuitive configuration process that automatically provisions the phones for immediate customer use. In addition, Digium's Asterisk software now supports Polycom HD Voice technology that enables calls with twice the clarity and sound quality of traditional analog calls.

Fonality releases trixbox 2.0, a free, easy to use, open source telephony and application platform. The new version, available for immediate download, can be installed in less than 15 minutes, supports multiple languages and provides increased reliability and stability, flexible user customization, and support for a wide-range of hardware vendors. The software also allows the community to upgrade individual deployment components versus having to reinstall from scratch with each upgrade. trixbox.org will also be hosting its first ever training Webinar entitled “Building An Open Source IP-PBX With trixbox 2.0” on January 30, 2007.

“The trixbox community said they wanted a super-reliable Asterisk deployment that removed all the headaches and that is what we strived to deliver in this release of trixbox 2.0,” said Andrew Gillis, founder of trixbox and director of community development at Fonality. “I always envisioned trixbox as a platform that would be both easy enough for people to quickly deploy and stable enough that they could stake their reputation on it. trixbox 2.0 is the realization of this vision.”

SIPBox announced it has become a certified Polycom reseller. SIPBox recommends the use of Polycom VoIP phones in all of its telephony deployments, specializing in Asterisk, the industry’s first open source telephony platform.

“We are eager to continue our growth in the open source market through our relationship with SIPBox,” said Jim Kruger, Vice President, Voice Marketing at Polycom. “As a value-added-reseller, SIPBox is making significant progress in the VoIP market and together we hope to bring our customers the total VoIP solution and support needed in a fast growing enterprise.”

Fonality, announced that PBXtra customers have placed more than 50 million calls and are now averaging more than 1.5 million calls per week across its award-winning IP-PBX platform. This rapid ramp in call volume further demonstrates Fonality’s success in the middle market and customer demand for high quality, value priced, reliable and fully supported IP telephony solutions.

“With the open source roots of Fonality’s PBXtra, we are able to offer businesses the one-two punch of enterprise-class features and value pricing,” said Chris Lyman, Fonality’s founder and CEO. “It’s no wonder we are growing so fast and so many companies are relying on PBXtra to provide them with the rock solid phone system they need to run their business.”