Expert View

September 23, 2005
Zultys' high feature enterprise VoIP systems

BANGALORE -- Zultys Technologies is a premier manufacturer of communications equipment for the enterprise. Its market focus is to provide modern VoIP solutions for today's business environment. Award winning products from Zultys include a range of IP PBX systems, IP telephones, and supporting peripherals.

Zultys produces highly integrated products that it claims are based entirely on open standards. This ensures interoperability with a broad range of devices and applications, giving its customers’ greater choice and flexibility. This scalability gives them the option to expand their systems as and when the need arises. All Zultys products appear to be easy to provision, administer, and use – with a focus on increasing productivity and reducing costs. 

Convergence Plus recently spoke with M G Kabir, country manager for India & SAARC, to know more about Zultys’ plans for the Indian market. Excerpts from the interview:

Convergence Plus: What are your plans for the Indian market?

MGK: Zultys has very ambitious plans for this region. One year ago we began operations in India and opened our Bangalore sales office in December, from which we cover India and SAARC. Our Bangalore facility will be a regional competence center, providing our customers with technical support as well as training for our resellers. We will soon start offering certification courses for pre-sales (ZCSS) and support engineers (ZCSE). Zultys has a strictly two-tiered distribution model, selling only through distributors and value-added resellers (VARs). The distributor’s role is to stock and promote Zultys through seminars, exhibitions, advertising, public relations, etc.

To date, most of our resellers have come from the data networking and security background. Every reseller is trained by Zultys on how to sell our products as well as how to deploy and maintain them. We support our resellers with demonstration equipment at discounted prices and offer Web-based training for all new sales staff. We are confident that we will be able to penetrate the entire India and SAARC region by March of next year. Our sales targets are very ambitious, but the potential for our resellers is also very attractive. The combination of our outstanding channel policies and world-renowned product innovation present unmatched RoI for partners willing to take on our products. Zultys never sells direct.

CP: How do you categorize the products manufactured by Zultys?

MGK: Systems available from Zultys include the award winning MX250, MX1200, and MX30. These products are truly the first fully integrated IP PBX systems that are based on open standards. Each system can autonomously provide full PBX functionality enhanced with real-time collaboration applications. Customers can cost effectively deploy an enterprise class VoIP platform for 5 to 10,000 users. These systems operate on real-time embedded Linux and custom hardware, especially designed for robustness through continuous use.

Zultys offers a line of fully functional phones that provide businesses with choices of feature set and expenditure. Each phone provides a high degree of functionality, all in a well-engineered business device from the simple business phone to the highly integrated remote office phone, all operating on open standards, making them a great complement to any IP PBX deployment.

Additionally, Zultys also provide a range of peripherals like gateways, battery power supplies, and Power over Ethernet (PoE) switches. These items enhance the functionality of a VoIP deployment by assisting businesses to complete a fully redundant VoIP architecture.

CP: Tell us about MXIE?

MGK: MXIE (pronounced "mixee") stands for “Media Exchange Interface for End users” and is a PC application that interfaces with the MX systems from Zultys. This software can be used by anyone in the enterprise, whether logged in as an individual, an operator, or a member of an ACD group. Using MXIE with an MX system provides powerful productivity tools and greatly enhances the user experience. It gives users a way to see the presence of other users, send and receive instant messages, place and receive calls, send and receive voice and fax messages, view central and local address books, configure comprehensive call handling rules, log in to ACD and operator groups, and much more. MXIE can be used either as a standalone tool with its own internal softphone, or in conjunction with a desk phone.

CP: Do you provide any IP communication solutions to control / avoid security breaches in the organisation?

MGK: Companies that take security seriously look carefully at an IP telephony solution before they buy. Things to look for include the following:

1) The operating system should be a stable real time operating system such as Monta Vista Linux. Many customers of ours have had the MX in their labs and have run port scans against the system and tried to hack into the MX. After a week of trying different things one customer indicated that all they could figure out was that we were running Linux, though they couldn’t even determine the kernel version.

2) Another key aspect of our IP phone systems and IP phones are how well they respond when experiencing Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. One method of handling these is to switch from an interrupt mode to a polling mode when experiencing an attack. This gives the device the ability to continue to operate and deal with the attack without being overwhelmed with requests.

3) Authentication of devices on an IP telephony system is necessary to ensure that people cannot impersonate others. The Zultys solution utilises digest authentication to validate all SIP devices, which connect to the system.

4) There are free network analysis tools such as Ethereal and others, which can be used to snoop and record VoIP calls. To protect against this, the voice stream must be encrypted. Zultys provides 128-bit AES encryption on the RTP (voice) traffic, which prevents this.

5) In order to be used in secure government and military applications, a phone has to have a locking feature so it cannot be used for on hook surveillance. On our ZIP4x4 and ZIP4x5 phones Zultys has implemented a phone locking feature which is invoked by pressing the Menu and * keys. This locks the phone down and makes it incapable of transmitting any data while on hook for surveillance. Once a sensitive conversation has taken place, the phone can be unlocked by pressing the Menu and * keys again. This allows the phone to reset and once again connect to the network.

CP: What are the latest trends and technologies in wireless IP phones?

MGK: Users of the wireless IP phones available today have two main complaints: 1) They do not contain the full feature set available on most IP desk top phones; and 2) They do not have adequate battery life.

The WIP 2 from Zultys addresses these issues by providing a wireless IP phone with all of the features and functionality found in a standard desktop IP business phone. The WIP 2 is built entirely on open standards and runs on a highly stable, real-time Linux operating system. The phone is compatible with any IP telephony system, using session initiation protocol (SIP), providing customers with greater flexibility in their telephony system. The WIP 2 is the first wireless IP phone to provide presence, and also offers two call appearances, voice encryption, paging, 3-way conferencing, instant messaging, and all standard telephony functions. This makes the WIP 2 ideal for a number of different applications and environments.

The WIP 2 is unique in its ability to give users significant talk and standby time. The phone provides better battery life than any product on the market, giving users four hours of continuous talk time and 12 hours of standby time. The phone makes it easy for a user to access all commonly used functions, such as hold, transfer, and DND.

CP: Does Zultys offer a call center solution to SMEs?

MGK: The inbound call center (ICC) software from Zultys is a complete software package for the Zultys Media Exchanges that handles incoming calls to a group of agents, distributes the calls based on specified rules, and queues them when agents are not available. The ICC then automatically distributes the calls to agents from the queue as they become available. The product functions as an advanced automatic call distributor (ACD).

Client software running on a PC provides agents and supervisors with real-time information about the operation of the call center, screen pops, presence, instant messaging, and a soft phone. The same software allows supervisors to manipulate calls in the queue. A customisable wallboard display can be configured which can appear on the PC desktop or be projected onto the wall without the need for any specialised equipment.

The ICC is a true IP call center based on SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). This permits an MX30 or MX250 to interoperate with a variety of gateways and phones from a variety of manufacturers. Agents can be located anywhere in the world, as long as they have a broadband Internet connection. This provides true flexibility and around the clock coverage, without having to relocate key talent.

The complete solution can be provided by Zultys, including the IP PBX (with or without redundancy), battery backup system, Ethernet switches, gateways, soft phones, hard phones, automatic archiving and ICC software. Zultys sells and supports its products worldwide.

CP: How does Zultys differentiate itself in the VoIP marketplace?

MGK: Since our incorporation in October 2001, we have developed a broad portfolio of products , wide industry recognition , a global presence with products that address global markets, and a technological lead over its competitors. Zultys started to ship products in March 2003 and is now well positioned to become a major player in the worldwide VoIP market.

Our differentiating factors are the following: 

1) We have a broad portfolio of products and are actively introducing new products every quarter. This differentiates us from other companies who may offer only IP phones, gateways, or IP PBXs. As such, Zultys can compete favorably with companies like Cisco, Avaya, and Nortel by offering a complete VoIP solution that includes IP PBXs, IP phones, PoE switches, PSTN gateways, battery backup supplies, and application servers.

Today, we serve businesses and enterprises with anywhere from one to 10,000 people, with users either centrally located or residing at multiple locations around the world.

2) We have achieved a global presence with its products and sales force, obtaining distribution agreements with highly reputable companies that cover more than 115 countries. In addition, Zultys also has branch offices in the UK, Australia, China, India and Russia. Further, Zultys has direct employees in Brazil, Germany, Singapore and Japan. This global approach has become an important consideration to many multi-national enterprises.

3) Since inception, we have championed open standards, giving businesses much greater flexibility when choosing communications equipment suppliers. Customers can buy a phone system from one company, select phones from another, and select server applications from a third. This is a major factor behind the decisions that many businesses make when deciding to make a transition to VoIP equipment. Zultys carefully evaluated many options for protocols on its VoIP products and decided that the way forward in this next wave of communication is open standards. Customers are demanding that their phone systems will be as interoperable as the other components of their data network.

4) Many of today’s VoIP suppliers have not provided an architecture designed for modularity and scalability. For example, a supplier who provides its VoIP solution as an integration of different servers and gateways has difficultly providing a cost effective solution for a smaller number of users. We have designed its VoIP platforms to be modular, allowing companies to start at a low number of users and expand quickly, often without any additional hardware.

5) Many suppliers today still require their customers to purchase multiple components from different manufacturers and perform complex integration work just to have a phone system on a LAN. This means a business would end up with disparate appliances for a PBX server, voice mail server, fax server, DHCP server, TFTP server, NTP server, instant messaging server, presence server, application layer gateway (ALG), and PSTN gateway. Zultys has designed its solution to provide true convergence by including all of this functionality into one convenient package.

6) We have invested heavily in making products that are easy to use. The PC client interface (MXIE) is wildly popular among all phone users. MXIE tightly integrates the functions of the phone with the PC operating system, whether using Windows, Macintosh, or Linux operating systems. From the PC, users can maintain a large address book, access their voice mail, see others’ availability, use enterprise instant messaging, set up personal call handling rules, and send and receive faxes.