Fonality Merges VoIP and CRM

By Greg McNevin

November 8, 2007: The worlds of open source CRM and VoIP are set to collide with the news that US-based open source PABX vendor Fonality will be acquiring Sydney CRM specialist Insightful Solutions.

Fonality claims it is going to unite the two worlds in order to provide an integrated communications and customer relationship management (CRM) platform aimed at SMEs.

Insightful Solutions handles SugarCRM deployments and has made some potent improvements to the platform. When combined with Fonality’s communications technology, the resulting product line is expect to combine instant messaging, fixed line and mobile calling with greater information access and presence management for starters.

"Telephony and CRM have a naturally concentric relationship, so this is good place to leverage hybrid-hosted and we are thrilled that the great folks at Insightful have joined forces with us to accelerate our unified offering to the global SMB marketplace," said Fonality CEO Chris Lyman.

Insightful’s operation will be merged with Fonality and its SugarCRM product re-launched as FonalityCRM. An entirely new product line merging the firms VoIP solution with its new CRM capabilities is expected to be released in early 2008.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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