This company's small business in a box allows ISPs to deliver everything including VoIP.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [July 5, 2007]

When Vancouver, Canada-based appliance maker Sutus came to ISPCON, it planned to start shipping boxes in July or August (the company is named after a breed of bulldog). That plan succeeded, and the first units have shipped already.

John Wigboldus, formerly of Adzilla, is the company's vice president of sales and channel development.

He demonstrated the prototypes to us. The company is optimistic, having received $5 million in funding earlier this year. The company partners with Polycomm for desktop equipment.

The company will be manufacturing its Business Central products in Taiwan, and is raising more funds for marketing and channel development. Wigboldus told us he expects to have two to four distributors selling to VARs and ISPs worldwide.

The target market is small business. "Our product is designed for businesses with 3 to 25 employees. The sweet spot is businesses with 9 to 15 users. At over 25 users, businesses start to want Exchange and begin to have complex phone systems."

Features of the Business Central 400 include:

• 802.11 b/g
• Web server
• Remote access through VPN and HTTPS
• DHCP server
• MAC address registration and filtering
• Mail server (based on open source software)
• VoIP through SIP (including SIP registrar and proxy and three person local conferencing)
• Dynamic and static DNS
• Automatic security updates
• T.38 fax support

"Not everyone wants to replace their PBX," Wigboldus admitted. "So we have SIP trunking and a POTS option."

The box can be managed by the ISP or by the customer, he added.

The file server is RAID 1 (mirroring) with two 320 GB hard drives.

Opening up the channel, getting into the lab
Sutus is in trials with several companies. We contacted Las Vegas-based Commpartners. Mark Petersen, Commpartners executive vice president of sales and marketing, wrote:

CommPartners gets requests from equipment manufacturers as well as our channel partner resellers to review hardware solutions, test interop with our network, and if appropriate, "certify" the equipment for use by our channel. This typically includes IADs, phones, IP PBX's, etc.

We had an initial request from one of our resellers who became aware of the Sutus solution and was interested in it as a potential solution for small business deployments. We lab-ed it up and ran it through our interop protocols with our IPTrunking product.

It performed well in the lab inter-oping with Polycom endpoints, and at the right price appears like it could be an attractive "all in one" data, networking, voice, file share, VPN solution for small businesses opening a new location or doing a forklift.

From the Commpartners perspective, the Interop piece is one leg of the stool. We typically like to see an existing channel that an equipment manufacturer works through so that not only do we technically certify it for release to CommPartners existing channel partners, but also there is opportunity to expand our service offering-in this case our IPTrunking product-to new channels.

As a relatively new company, Sutus is getting its channel development program and demand generation underway. We look forward to them creating demand for the product and for CP having the opportunity to offer the IPTrunking connectivity for VARs to bundle with this solution

Pricing and availability
The Business Central 400, serving up to 25 people, is available now. The appliance lists at $6,200 (but a company installing it will also need VoIP phones).

Over time, the company will add many more futures. "Our product road map is like 300 pages, and we're on page 2," said Wigboldus.

—End