We've recently added executive Q&As to the CBRonline news service and one of the first features Chris Lyman, chief executive of open source networking vendor Fonality.
My colleague Rhonda Ascierto posed the questions and you can the results are here. It's an interesting read as Lyman discusses the acquisition of Avaya by a private equity consortium, the impact of open source on the networking industry, the hosted PBX model, and the competitive advantage of open source.
Here's an example of his thoughts on the latter:
Q. When Fonality beats out competitive proposals from Avaya, Nortel and Cisco is it primarily because of cost?
A. Yes.
Q. So, in addition to cost, what is open-source's competitive advantage over proprietary?
A. There is one other distinct advantage we have and that is being a standards-based approach. We are totally standards based and everyone else is propriety. This means telecommuting flexibility. That basically the fundamental recognition that the phone system is the world's network and not bounded by the four corners of your office. When you take your office phone or soft phone home and plug it into your DSL modem, you can instantly dial anybody in your office for free, with no configuration. That's the result of standards-based approach because everyone is using the same standards but the oligopoly is not. They require you to purchase a special license, etc.
And we took a really simple approach whereby you pay one price and you get every feature.
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