VoIP For The Small-Business Set

Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. last week debuted an IP business-communications system designed for small and midsize businesses. It supports up to 672 ports and offers a built-in scripting language to help create applications relatively easily.

As part of the rollout of the Strata CIX, which will be on the market in the next month or two, Toshiba's digital-solutions division introduced a personal administration tool that lets users set up speed-dial numbers and program feature buttons using a Web browser. A system-administration tool lets IT staff manage both the CIX and Toshiba's Strategy ES Voice Processing systems. Toshiba also has a line of IP phones.

While designed for IP telephony, the CIX can be enabled for conventional time-division multiplexed phones to let customers run a mix of equipment. The system offers more than 200 features, such as letting a user route incoming calls to any device or location, Toshiba says. The FeatureFlex scripting language can be used to create applications that display on the phone data retrieved from back-office systems, as well as from stock, weather, and financial online sites.

The vendor also is offering the Strata Media Applications Server, which supports auto attendant, voicemail, automated speech recognition, text-to-speech, unified messaging, interactive voice response, and automatic call distribution and reporting.

In the IP telephony market, Toshiba will compete against Avaya, Cisco Systems, and Mitel. "Toshiba's system offers some flexibility in terms of programming and features, which could make it a compelling product," says Will Stofega, a senior research analyst at IDC. "But it's an ultracompetitive market, and small and midsized business are extremely price sensitive."

Toshiba estimates the CIX will be priced at $500 to $800 per user station without voicemail and $560 to $900 with voicemail. The SoftIPT client for PCs is priced at around $160, and the WIPT2000 Wireless IP Telephone is priced at $595.