October 1, 2007 represents a coup for Digium and 3Com.
3Com announced that it will OEM the Digium 'crayon box' appliance (officially called the Asterisk Appliance) for small businesses with less than 30 extensions. 3Com's previous low end offering, the NBX v3000 unit is a 1U server (with big noisy fan) was too much hardware and too much reseller handling for this price and geometry-sensitive market. This blog has written about my experience with the NBX.
This approach could greatly expand the global footprint for voice by 3Com. 3Com has not been successful selling VoIP outside the USA (USA counts for about 90% of global voice revenues). In the USA a big chunk of the LAN switching revenues - especially LAN switches with Power over Ethernet - come attached to deals with VoIP. And, since the appliance works with most of the 3Com IP phones (3101, 3102, 3103 and the 3Com-Polycom IP conference room phones) this appliance could make a big difference globally if 3Com can broaden the reseller appeal and deliver an ISDN BRI option for global markets.
3Com says that they'll be using an 'open distribution' model where any authorized 3Com reseller can sell it, but only 3Com Professional Services (or the 3Com voice reseller authorized to service and support) provide the installation and support services.
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