SAN JOSE, CALIF. (March 31, 2009) - Virtual PBX®, the inventor and leading supplier of hosted business phone services, and Gizmo5, the leading standards-based consumer calling service, today announced a new collaboration that gives clients a complete business-class phone solution that offers the industry’s deepest feature set at a price level well below the current industry standard.
Built on an open-system VoIP peering platform, the new service combines the feature-rich products of both companies. As part of the announcement, Virtual PBX has launched iVPBX, a new product that provides customers with unlimited inbound calling and no per-minute fees at a price of just under $10 per seat -- about one-fourth to one-fifth the cost of most competing plans. Gizmo5 clients who use the new iVPBX product can send calls by IP directly to their Gizmo phones at no cost.
“This deeper relationship with Gizmo5 is a sound next step for Virtual PBX, following on its innovative open VoIP peering technology announced last November,” said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group. “The attractive pricing for its new iVPBX product comes at an ideal time given the current economic conditions, and continues Virtual PBX’s leadership in supporting the small business market.”
Virtual PBX has been delivering calls to businesses through its hosted PBX service since 1997. Typically, companies using the service have one main business number for clients to call. Virtual PBX takes those calls, answers them with a “virtual” attendant, and then delivers them to employees using any kind of phone, in any location. This has enabled small firms and those with distributed employees to portray a professional phone image and get top-end features without the expense or maintenance hassles of purchasing their own telecommunications hardware.
Traditional Virtual PBX pricing plans include a varying number of free minutes with a price of 4.4 to 6.5 cents per minute for additional usage. With the new iVPBX product, available now, calls coming in on a local number and sent to a Gizmo5 phone will have no per-minute fee for unlimited use. For more information on iVPBX, visit www.virtualpbx.com/plans-and-prices.
Gizmo5 offers VoIP services to both consumers and businesses. Users can make and receive calls from any computer with browser access to the Internet, or use Gizmo5 to power IP phones. Gizmo adds a whole host of features like call recording, IM, file sharing, and much more. Setting up a Gizmo5 account is free, and so are inbound calls to a Gizmo client, with a small fee for outbound dialing. By adding the Virtual PBX service, business users of Gizmo5 gain all the advantages of a high-end PBX, such as an auto-attendant, transferring calls between users, and routing calls to departments though ACD queues.
“We’re very excited about this partnership,” said Paul Hammond, CEO of Virtual PBX. “Our new iVPBX product gives users a very low-cost plan with unlimited usage, and the combination of Virtual PBX and Gizmo5 delivers the best of both worlds at a fraction of the cost of typical hosted IP-PBX offerings.”
Michael Robertson, CEO of Gizmo5, commented, “For Gizmo5 business customers, Virtual PBX’s new iVPBX product, adds top-flight PBX services with no hardware or software costs. This is a great example of how standards-based SIP can benefit both service providers and users.”
Both companies will be promoting the partnership. More information about the products and the partnership can be found at www.virtualpbx.com/gizmo5 and www.gizmo5.com/pc/network/virtualpbx.
