Zultys, Phybridge Partner to Ease Transition to VoIP

Phybridge and Zultys, Inc. recently announced a partnership to assist companies in deploying a complete VoIP solution over legacy telephone cabling. Phybridge’s recently launched UniPhyer appliance enables deployment of VoIP over traditional phone lines, while Zultys’ MX250 and MX30 IP phone systems provide a full range of unified communications functionality.

Zultys’ IP phone systems are managed via the company’s MXIE unified communications client. "This client on your desktop weaves all of the communications functions of the IP PBX—all your call functionality, your contact and presence functionality, visual voicemail, softphone… all into one desktop client," says John Cunningham, Zultys’ director of marketing.

And Phybridge’s UniPhyer appliance, introduced in March of this year, creates a Parallel Voice Network (PVN) for any IP PBX—enabling VoIP to be deployed over existing wiring. "It allows a company to leverage the two-wire infrastructure… and create a complete parallel IP network—with PoE [power over Ethernet]," says Phybridge CEO John Croce. "Everyone says that the ideal topology—if you had unlimited financial resources and were willing to accept disruption—is to have two separate LANs with one point of convergence. And in essence, that’s what we do—at a fraction of the cost—without the disruption."

The result, Croce says, is reduced cost, quick deployment, and increased reliability. "It centralizes the PoE, it optimizes the port utilization, it minimizes your UPS requirements—so what we in essence give our partners like Zultys is all the benefits of IP, yet the reliability of a TDM phone infrastructure," he says. "QoS is guaranteed on the LAN side, and day-two management of a voice and data network is simplified."

Cunningham says the combination of Zultys’ phone system with the Phybridge UniPhyer can be particularly attractive to resellers. "It removes an obstacle to going to VoIP for a customer," he says. "Our VARs… have a lot of customers who have been using traditional TDM systems—this is another great tool for them to use to go back to that customer base and upgrade them to VoIP."

And Croce says the partnership also helps guarantee interoperability. "What’s really important for our partners, as they present and deploy this solution with customers, is the confidence in knowing that the solution is going to work as stated," he says. "One of the biggest issues our VAR partners have with regards to presenting unified communications and convergence to customers is the fact that they don’t know what the experience is going to be like, because no two LANs are alike."

That, Croce says, makes the combination of Zultys’ VoIP/UC functionality with Phybridge’s reliability particularly attractive. "What we’re working towards is a whole program around ensuring that the partner has the confidence, the tools, to provide the customer with the experience. Our partnership is ultimately about enabling our mutual partners to go in and, regardless of customer size or customer-specific LAN considerations, be confident in the experience that they’re going to provide."

In fact, Cunningham says, that’s how Zultys has to approach every one of its partnerships, by necessity. "We take the interoperability facet very seriously," he says. "We put any ITSP that we’re working with through a very rigorous interoperability test plan… we don’t want our customer base to have false steps when it comes to deploying the overall, end-to-end application—and that’s part of what we are doing here, making sure that everything is as stated and as expected."

And ultimately, Cunningham says, the new partnership is all about helping cautious customers transition to VoIP. "The advantages of going to Zultys in particular for a unified communications solution—and of VoIP in general—are so compelling that now, with the Phybridge/Zultys connection, there’s no excuse not to migrate to VoIP," he says. "All the obstacles have been taken down."