I have a customer who wants a stand-alone teleconferencing system with local access numbers, customized prompts and branding and is completely separate from their PBX.

Basically "the company" is actually more than a dozen independent companies over eight states and two provinces each doing their own thing IT and telephone wise. But the "head office" assumes certain responsibilities and is trying to get a handle on teleconferencing costs and wishes to do so by hosting their own system after some poor experiences with "value" providers. I have supported their Norstar/CallPilot install for a decade and they came to me with this.

It seems obvious this is something that should be built on a software PBX platform with SIP trunks. But which one? Snom? 3CX? Asterisk? Is there an off-the-shelf appliance solution? (that doesn't cost $40,000).

I have Asterisk and 3CX setup at home with a bunch of Linksys and Yealink phones but I have never actively marketed VOIP anything.

Insights are appreciated,

Gord

I would look into an Asterisk distro, Elastix being my favorite. Put in a server, add some SIP Trunking, DIDs and IP Conference Phones.

sipXecs is another option that has a built in conference server. I've deployed just the conference server of sipXecs to supplement a Cisco Call Manger Express customer that needed more robust conferencing services. It is all GUI via a web browser.

You could pair this with a SIP service such as 1-voip that will give you unlimited incoming minutes with unlimited concurrent calls for a very reasonable rate. You could probably purchase additional virtual numbers to meet the requirement for local numbers in various areas.

Actually, you need to determine the number of simultaneous conference groups and anticipated calls for each group at any given time, before a solution can be offered.

I'm reselling hosted VOIP and with the carrier I use you could dial into that company, be transferred into Ext. 7000 and create a conference, dozens could call in.