Aksys Networks announces its KONNECT Office Phone System, the first serverless full-featured telephone system for small offices that operates standalone, requiring no additional equipment. The simplicity of connecting multiple offices together will transform small businesses.

KONNECT fills an important need for businesses seeking the benefits of VoIP, but that are wary of business interruptions. Most small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) aren’t willing to rely solely on Internet connections for their phones, because cable modem and ADSL services experience outages from time to time, which can prevent or terminate important calls. In addition, many offices aren’t ready yet to trust their main inbound number to VoIP technology. With KONNECT, offices can continue using their existing telco lines and use VoIP for free interoffice calls, selecting either VoIP or the public switched telephone network (PSTN) for outbound calls. In this manner, KONNECT offers offices the best of the old and new.

“We are pleased to offer small businesses a way to access all the benefits of VoIP, while enabling them to preserve their connections to existing land lines, which they trust,” said Martin Sunstrum, president and CEO of Aksys. "Our ability to seamlessly support local landlines, and tie together home and/or remote offices into one unified phone system provides unprecedented simplicity to today's small office market.”

KONNECT is the easiest VoIP phone system available for small businesses to install and configure. They can attach the phones to existing local-area networks (LANs) and configure phones in less than five minutes per phone. All that is required out-of-the-box is to assign an extension number and name for each phone and SMBs will be up and running. Sunstrum noted that other vendors have claimed this simplicity before but have failed to deliver. Ultimately, they have had to use separate gateways or special routers/servers, which can quickly become complex when tying multiple sites together.

Key features of the KONNECT Office Phone System include the following:

• Easily connect multiple locations together
• Free 3 digit dialing between locations
• VoIP and PSTN in each phone
• Business telephony features including auto attendant, conference calls, individual and group paging and voicemail, with the option of email delivery
• No server or PBX to install or configure
• Business quality speakerphone with user-programmable feature keys
• System scales set by set -- no need to purchase a minimum number of units
• Completely automated for adds, moves and changes
• Browser-based configuration of the phone system.
• Complete features can be found at www.aksysnetworks.com/konnect

Unveiled at CES 2007

Aksys will publicly unveil KONNECT at 2007 International CES in Las Vegas, Jan. 8 – 11, 2007 at booth Sands 71611A.

The new solution is particularly attractive for SOHO users and small offices as it includes a full-featured business phone complete with auto attendant, voicemail, VoIP and PSTN for under $300. With a single phone they can present a professional image. It offers them the lowest total cost of ownership and the greatest flexibility.

Pricing & Availability

The system will be available from VARs and office retailers in Q2 this year at a suggested retail price of $295 USD.