What Nortel's Pingtel Acquisition Means for Small Businesses
93 days ago
One concern many small businesses have about open-source IP PBXes is security. Not the kind of security having to do with hackers and break-ins, but rather the kind involving future support and upgrades. It's the type of service that large vendors are best equipped to provide. Users of IP PBXes based on Pingtel Corp. open-source software may have worried more about such issues than those using Asterisk-based products, given that Pingtel was lesser-known than Asterisk leaders Digium Inc. and Fonality. Nortel Networks' recent acquisition of Pingtel should quiet some of those concerns.
The Prior Partnership
Even before the acquisition, Nortel had been using Pingtel-developed IP PBX software commercially. The company had in fact built an entire IP phone system — the SCS500, targeting installations of up to 500 users — around it. The vendor had also played an active role in the open-source community centered on SIP foundry, the organization Pingtel set up to oversee the development of its sipXecs software. Buying Pingtel brought Nortel both the code base for Pingtel's software and the engineers who had developed it, observed Current Analysis Inc. analyst Rob Arnold.
Going with Pingtel software for the SCS500 had brought Nortel some real benefits, noted Frost & Sullivan analyst Krithi Rao. For one thing, Nortel already had another SMB (small- to medium-sized business) product, its BCM (Business Communications Manager), for up to 200 users. But according to Rao, using the Pingtel platform allowed Nortel to provide a product equally useful for medium-sized companies more quickly than if it had tried to develop a solution on its own.
Nortel's use of Pingtel software benefited its customers as well. One disadvantage of the BCM product was that extra features came as add-ons, said Rao. The open-source software, by contrast, contains more integrated unified-communications features. That makes it easier for companies to adapt and upgrade their phone systems as they grow.
But it may have been the broader community of end users who benefited most, because they could obtain such features from giant Nortel rather than from tiny Pingtel and its resellers. In general, "Getting [a] solution from larger vendors means more support, more distribution channels and more options," Rao noted. "It gives [smaller companies] some assurance that it's a large name vendor behind the product rather than a smaller vendor or a newer vendor."
The fact that Nortel now has permanent control over the software only adds to this assurance. "At the end of the day I think the advantage [of the acquisition] is to end customers," Rao said.
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