Heard an ad on the car radio yesterday. Went something like this: "The Cudatel Phone system from Barracuda Networks. Fire your phone guy and install it yourself" Interesting.

I've only worked with their ASG (Anti-Spam Gateway) products, but based on that experience I'm very interested in seeing how this plays out. They are very good at taking complex/finicky technologies and packaging them with a manager-proof interface. When we deployed them, they were almost literally plug and play, and we had an unusually complex mail routing setup.

If they put as much polish on this as they do on their spam appliance, I can see it going over well in the SMB market. Obviously the usual pitfalls with network reliability and QoS will come into play, but for smaller companies where routing over slow WAN links isn't an issue, I can see it going over well.

ooohhhh shiny!!!!
https://www.cudatel.com/images/deployment.jpg

:shrug:

I have heard of them before (got a mailer), but never seen one in action. Looks like another SIP based system that is sold with bundles of licenses rather than per license. Probably OK but nothing special. I think there is a thread on here that talks about it....

EDIT: I only found 1 thread and it was in the installers forum but had no replies.

Steve

It's based on FreeSwitch. That's all I know.

That's essentially their modus operandi. The ASG product that we used was based on Postfix, ClamAV and SpamAssassin... all solid products, but not exactly point-and-click friendly.

They take the freely-available tech, build a manager-proof web interface for it, slap it on some commodity hardware and re-sell it along with a support subscription.

The licensing is nice too. They don't sell per-user licenses, or even license bundles. They sell you the hardware and a support contract, and tell you "This is about how many users this hardware can support. If you go over, we're not going to charge you or lock you out, but there will be a performance hit."

Yeah, same thing we do on our software. Primarily because it's a pain in the ass to build in a licensing scheme and enforce it. Since it's opensource anyways, all you can really license and restrict is the web interface.