Aretta Video Interview: Leveraging Asterisk in a New Generation

Editor’s Note: This article refers to an interview shot during a TMC (News - Alert) (News - Alert) media event, as part of “Inside the Studio” special edition series. To view the entire library of videos from Road Shows and other industry shows, as well as product demos visit TMCnet Videos home page. For information on upcoming TMC events, including our August 12 open house, please contact Jaime Hernaez (jhernaez@tmcnet.com).

What is the next generation in telephony? For many, they believe it is found in the open platform of Asterisk. Marc Fribush (News - Alert), President of Aretta Communications believes this to be true. To get a closer look at his company and what Aretta is doing with Asterisk, TMCnet’s Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) talked with Fribush in an interview captured in this video.

Aretta is a next generation hosted telephony service provider out of Atlanta, Georgia that got its start in 2006. Company founders looked at Asterisk (News - Alert) in 2006 and determined what it would do for the market. Fribush himself had been with Dialogic before 2006 and explored the opportunity of Asterisk. He then built a company around the hosted Asterisk solution.

For customers, what does that mean? Next generation hosted PBX (News - Alert) offering. Using Linux server virtualization to get the cost down and still provide a full-featured solution.  It also means using a lot of open source technologies and virtualization to provide many instances of Asterisk on a physical machine – allows for lower price and dedicated Asterisk hosted machine.

“One of the biggest advantages is the customization ability,” said Fribush.  “With a large system it is very difficult to customize a specific feature for a specific customer. With our product, we can actually customize an individual instance of their virtual machine in a very short timeframe.”

Does this approach bog down the system? Fribush noted that the company sizes appropriately and can distribute the load if necessary. They will also size for the total number of calls through one machine. According to Fribush, Aretta uses very high powered hardware with lots of RAM so they can handle a lot of simultaneous calls.

What are customers saying? They love it compared to traditional solutions and the company enjoys a low churn rate. They offer the advantage of an aggressive pricing model, which is not per seat, but per channel to allow unlimited extensions. Customers just pay for the maximum number of calls the company will make.

As for what is happening next? Aretta has enjoyed great success over the last three years and now has about 1,000 customers. The company has received a lot of inquiries from resellers and service providers interested in leveraging the technology, so opportunities are presenting themselves.

To find out more, check out the video below:

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi