As Lionel posted in January, small businesses are increasingly turning to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for more cost-effective, easy-to-manage phone systems, and Dell has partnered with Fonality and Nortel to bring VoIP solutions to our customers.

We are hosting a webcast this Thursday, April, 24^th from 1:00-2:00 PM Central time in partnership with PCMagCast and Fonality focusing on the challenges small and medium businesses face, how today’s phone systems can address them, and some features of the Fonality offering.  Come armed with your questions as you will be able to ask them throughout the event.  

Since January, we’ve built new functionality and options into our VoIP offerings and wanted to share our progress with you. Based on conversations with current customers, we learned about two primary issues we needed to address with our Fonality phone systems: provide a redundant solution and add installation services as an option. We’ve made those updates and a few others.

New Form Factor:

· In addition to being offered on the Dell OptiPlex 330 desktop, the three Fonality products (Small Office, Enterprise, and Call Center) are now available on the Dell PowerEdge 1950 server.  This is a 1U, rack mount server that offers hardware RAID for data backup and redundant power supplies to maintain operation in the event of power supply failure.  Because phone systems are critical to doing business and you can’t afford for them to go down, the redundancy is an important improvement to the line.

New Features:

• Fonality Live Backup Server.  For companies that want even more protection in the event their phone system goes down, Live Backup Server is also available.  In essence, you purchase two identical phone systems that are synchronized so that if one goes down the other takes over.
• We now offer fax capability on the Fonality OptiPlex solution. Now you can plug in a fax machine to one of the analog ports on the OptiPlex to send and receive faxes.
• A new Fonality software revision is now available with added “FindMe” features.  For an updated product features matrix highlighting the new additions click here.

New Service and Sales Options:

• Fonality now offers onsite, professional installation and training.  So, while we boast that the Fonality solution is so intuitive that anyone could install it themselves, there is now an option if you would rather have someone else do it. 
• We’ve also added a new quote tool to the VoIP site so you can determine the cost of a phone system from Dell before engaging a sales agent. You just answer a few simple questions and receive a Fonality quote via email.

Please let us know what you think and what else you’d like to see Dell do in the area of VoIP.