Dale Ranney
COO
Atlantic Development PArtners, LLC
Saint Augustine Florida

Yeah you didn’t call it “At your Service” back then. On the call you simply referred to it as your “phone provisioning service”. Same thing, different name. You still spent the second half of your phone-call selling. And my guess is if I had bought what you were selling, I wouldn’t be seeing blogs like this from you down the road.

As for your original, and largely obtuse, point about Fonality vs. Digium, it is pretty clear you don’t understand Digium’s product offering. From Digium, for $995, you get their Asterisk CD and an instruction book. For that same price, Fonality sells you a full server, pre-loaded with our very stable Asterisk and our award-winning PBXtra application – yep for the same $995. And, if the occasional security nut doesn’t like our darn tunnel, they would still end up getting both Asterisk and a server for the same price as you get a CD and a help-book from Digium.

Marcelo, look, in all fairness, you should really do your homework and try installing Asterisk Business Edition and then installing a PBXtra. Only then will you have garnered the journalistic integrity needed to produce a valid comparative review.

My advice? Setup a lab and actually take the time to do a proper bake-off of Asterisk Business Edition vs. Fonality’s PBXtra. Heck, call it the: “What I got for $995” review.

But, until you *do* take that time, your attempts at comparative blogging come off a bit light in the fact department.

- chris

There was no discussion about Voxilla offering provisioning services to Fonality for two reasons: We weren’t offering these services in April of 2005 and those services are not applicable to what Fonality markets. Voxilla At-Your-Service was launched on September 22, 2005 (the press release went out on Sept. 15, and can be easily found on various sites via Google). The service is explicitly for IP voice service providers, and is not offered to PBX developers such as Fonality or “a-la-carte” to end users (as Lyman’s postscript asserts).

During the phone conference product demo, Lyman told us that Fonality can do automatic full provisioning of Polycom phones. And, yes, that was of interest to us. Up until very recently (last month, I believe), Polycom’s firmware did not support setting the phone’s administrative password remotely. We were using Polycom phones internally and, though the phones were mostly provisioned over FTP, we were setting the admin passwords directly on the phone’s keypad. So we asked Lyman how Fonality overcame the limitation. Lyman checked with someone, came back and told us that indeed Fonality does set the password remotely, but never explained how.

Lyman’s serious accusations do serve a purpose: to obfuscate the original point of the story. The column was written as a result of and explicitly pegged to a post about Fonality and Digium by an influential industry blogger. I pointed out that Fonality is easier to use but, to the security conscious, Digium’s offering is probably a better solution — and explained why.

It’s as simple as that, and no other motivation was involved.

All right. Out of fairness in your attempts to appear to your audience as an objective journalist, I have tried to spare you. But, enough is enough. It is time that I let your readers know your true motivations for disparaging Fonality.

In order to peel back the onion, I need to expand upon the brief, yet poignant, history between our firms — your IP hardware/services company, Voxilla, company and my IP-PBX company, Fonality.

As stated in my open letter (http://www.smithonvoip.com/2006/11/04/chris-lyman-an-open-letter-to-marcelo-rodriguez/) you and I have only ever spoken once. It was in April of 2005 and you called me up in an attempt to feign apology for failing to mention Fonality in an Asterisk round-up article that you commissioned here: .

Side-note: Thanks to Fonality’s excellent centralized reporting engine, I was just able to produce a report for this call with a click of the mouse. It was on April 25, 2005 at 2:10pm and lasted over an hour. See here for a screenshot of this call: http://www.fonality.com/images/Marcelo_tries_to_sell_Fonality_his_services.gif

Back to the call you placed. So, you called me up and introduced yourself. And, immediately you began apologizing for not mentioned Fonality in this Asterisk round-up. Honestly, I hadn’t even read the article until you called me, and really didn’t think it was a big deal once you told me. But, you did. And, you kept lamenting on how you couldn’t believe that Carolyn (the author) had forgotten to mention Fonality, and how you were going to make it up to me, etc, etc. In your state of continued prostration, you even promised Fonality an exclusive article to be featured on your site. I remember this because I was so excited I called up our PR firm right after and told them all about it. Yes, Fonality was pretty young back then, so somebody promising to do an exclusive was pretty exciting.

Here’s where our call took a strange turn. Right after promising Fonality this “exclusive”, you then promptly switched gears and began to try to sell me on having Fonality use Voxilla’s At Your Service (Voxilla | At Your Service) phone provisioning system. Apparently, you were asking that we (Fonality) begin to pay you (Voxilla) a fee to provision the IP phones that we sell alongside our PBXtra IP-PBX. I was surprised with your overt sales tactics, given that you began the call under the auspices of a journalist. It seemed like mixing a bit too much church and state for my taste.

But, I made no mention of it and proceeded to listen to your sales pitch about the benefits of your easy provisioning system. Let me remind you how the conversation went from that point (and I paraphrase):

Me: “Thanks for the offer Marcelo, but we already have a provisioning system that we built in-house. It provisions Ciscos, Snoms, SwissVoices, and Polycoms automatically without us having to touch a single button on the phone. We have had it for over a year.”

You: “You can auto-provision a Polycom phone without touching a key? I don’t believe it.”

Me: “I think so, hang on, let me ask my CTO.”

I put down the phone and ask my CTO – yep, he verifies it.

I come back to the call and confirm for you what my CTO has told me. Understandably, you immediately stop pursuing selling me on your own engine. Then, clearly not happy, you end the phone call. I have never heard from you again until this thread.

And, after our one-and-only call, you never did end up writing about Fonality in your promised exclusive. Oddly, you even had Carolyn Shuk call me up as promised and engage me in a 33-minute “exclusive”. In fact, you had Carolyn talk to me a total of three times between May and December 19, 2005. All three times, nothing ended up in print on your site.

Come to think of it, Marcelo, how is it that you claim to have a leading IP telephony news site and you have never once blogged on Fonality in our 3-year history…even though Fonality is clearly a market leader in this open source revolution? As a “journalist” clearly you must know that Fonality has long been the world’s largest commercial Asterisk deployment with customers in 22 countries, 40 million calls made across our platform, 2000 resellers, thousands of customers, and not a peep. Odd isn’t it? Perhaps I should have bought your service after all.

Now, Marcelo, I could take more of my time to reply to the host of new inaccuracies in your last post — particularly in and around your randomly-generated factoids re: call logging. But, if I geek out about the high CPU load that results from complex database joins across multiple tables and how these CPU spikes cause degradation of audio channels within Asterisk, I might lose the spirit of this letter.

Finally, please spare the hyperbole. Despite your repeated attempts to paint this conversation as an earthshaking discourse, the only “furor” this has caused has been a fury of cross-blogging between you and a couple of other bloggers as you attempt to drive traffic to your store. The rest of the industry is much too informed to give credit to your labeling of a low-intensity VPN as a national security threat.

Oops, an employee at my ISP just sniffed these packets! I gotta get out of here before they find me!

–
Chris Lyman
Fonality Chief Packet Sniffer

P.S. You claim to have no vested interest in Fonality’s Asterisk or Digum’s Asterisk, yet you run an Asterisk news-group on Voxilla.com to which you sell third-party advertising on. You also directly advertise to this forum your own Voxilla IP phone provisioning service. And, remember, the more folks you are able to scare people away from Fonality’s pre-provisioned appliance + phones with your security scare tactics, the more revenue you may be able to pick up with your ala carte phone provisioning service. Sounds like a vested interest to me!