I've never heard of the Amanda Company, but an Asterisk appliance is certainly a solution that I'd expect to gain some serious traction across a number of business segments.

The Amanda Company Announces Availability of Vdex-40

Embedded Asterisk Phone System Like No Other - The Amanda Company will release at months end what is claimed to be the first embedded Asterisk Phone System to enhance voice quality through the inclusion of multiple microprocessors as well as DSPs. The elimination of moving parts such as fans and hard drives further enhances reliability. Teams of engineers in Europe, Asia Pac and USA have worked over the past 24 months to create Vdex. Despite Vdex's cutting edge technology and hardened code-base Vdex is priced to please the small office market.

San Diego, California, USA, 15 January 2008 -- The Amanda Company announced the commercial release of TechnoCo's Vdex-40 embedded Asterisk* IP-PBX appliance in North America. Stock will be available at the end of January 2008.

Teams of engineers have been working over the past 24 months hardening the Asterisk code base and porting it to TechnoCo's architecture. TechnoCo claim Vdex to be the first Asterisk Appliance to maximize voice quality by implementing separate microprocessors dedicated to the processing of voice and data. Vdex's architecture also includes as standard, additional digital signal processor(s) for the compression of voice and cancellation of echo.

Yet despite this advanced technology Amanda state that Vdex-40 is an affordable, Internet enabled telephone system designed specifically for the Small Office Home Office market.

Product quality is further improved through the use of flash memory to replace spinning hard disk drives and the elimination of unnecessary cooling fans. The claim is that the removal of electromechanical components functions to provide greater reliability than the mechanical equivalents used with traditional PC server solutions thereby providing a longer product lifespan.

TechnoCo states that Vdex-40 is the only embedded Asterisk appliance to ship standard with sixteen G.711, G.723.1, G.726 and G.729a/b voice codecs (mix of 16 concurrent codecs), hardware based G.168 echo cancellation and four built-in telecom line ports. Additional telecom lines may be added using SIP trunks. Vdex-40 also includes multiple automated attendants, voice mail, conference bridges, conference recording, remote extensions, multi-location bridging, mobile extensions with laptop soft phones and voice mail forwarding to e-mail. Administration is accomplished with a web-browser based GUI.

Vdex-40's graphical user interface is designed to ease the installation, administration and support of the product while simultaneously maintaining the power and flexibility of Asterisk. Advanced users can still directly access and modify the Asterisk dialplans within the system and create nested IVR and complex configurations.

"This release is quite an accomplishment given that Vdex-40 is the first Asterisk based appliance that has had the Asterisk code hardened to run on multiple processors in addition to separate DSP's to insure voice and call processing quality," stated Mr. David Woo, Managing Director of The Amanda Company, who also added, "and with true appliance oriented design using flash memory and no moving parts, Vdex-40 is not prone to the electro mechanical failure experienced by traditional server based solutions".

About TechnoCo Pty Ltd TechnoCo ( www.technoco.biz )
Founded by three pioneers of the voice over Internet (VoIP) industry whose previous company, OzEmail Interline, was the first in the world to provide commercial Internet telephony to the public on a global basis. Operating across seventeen countries, OzEmail Interline was sold "last century" to a division of MCI WorldCom. While maintaining interests in the technology sector the founders identified an opportunity to empower contributors to open source VoIP software and created "TechnoCo".

About The Amanda Company
The Amanda Company ( www.taa.com ) designs, develops, and delivers call processing systems for small to medium businesses that include voice mail, automated attendants, fax servers, IVR systems, unified messaging, desktop ACD's, and VoIP IP-PBX systems.

Notes: Vdex is an acronym derived from the phrase: Voice Digital EXchange.

Trademarks
*Asterisk is a registered trademark of Digium, Inc., an entity with which Amanda and TechnoCo Pty Ltd have no association. Vdex utilizes a subset of Asterisk code modified by TechnoCo Pty Ltd Vdex-40 is a trademark of TechnoCo Pty Ltd. Amanda is a registered trademark of The Amanda Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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