CEO Rich Tehrani recently conducted an interview at ITEXPO East 2011 in Miami with Xorcom’s CEO and Co-founder Eran Gal. Both men kicked off the interview complimenting the weather in Miami – fittingly, since the event was held in February.
Xorcom was founded in 2004, “based on Asterisk technology,” Gal said. About a year and a half ago, he told TMC’s Paula Bernier in an interview that the company was captivated by the Asterisk Open Source PBX during the time in which open source telephony was picking up speed.
“With the understanding that this approach was destined to change the market completely, we set out to become a leading vendor in open source telephony market,” said Gal.
Gal hit the company’s pricing and flexibility as two of its main market differentiators against “any other proprietary system.” They came to the show with a new release in tow — the XE series of Xorcom’s PBX’s. The company already offers the XR2000 and XR3000 series, and its XE series (XE2000 and XE3000) also handles both traditional (Public Switched Telephone Network) and VoIP calls, but comes with features rendering them a significant upgrade, such as microprocessor-based temperature control with redundant fans, redundant hard disk drives, internal backup and recovery support.
Tehrani couldn’t help but note the antenna on the box Gal brought for the interview. Gal said, “This is a completely new direction we are going in. Xorcom is the first to have integrated ZigBee technology into the PBX.” It’s a meshed wireless network, aimed not at replacing WiFi, Gal said, but more for monitoring with low bandwidth and low-power consumption.
He said it is based on feedback from Xorcom’s partners and customers, which led the company to create the XE series — “not just what we think the market wants.”
In fact, Gal called the XE the “big brother” of the successful XR series, Xorcom’s attempt to enter a bit higher-end market. He characterized the major areas of improvement as being in reliability and disaster recovery. Overall it appears to be a more robust series, geared to work which does, in fact, need to get done at night for the next day.
Asked to specify the customer Xorcom had in mind when they created the new series, Gal described existing customers across several verticals — small office operations and banks, security firms, who all want to see more reliability and monitoring built in. He mentioned customers such as Fortune 500 companies and cruise ships, “places which are naturally more sensitive and want to see more built-in reliability.”
