What is a PBX?

The term PBX spawns from the original term PABX, which is an acronym for Private Automatic Branch Exchange. Essentially a PBX is a private telephony switch that is used for its internal employees to communicate both between themselves and the outside world. The purpose of a PBX was to allow a company to have more phones than physical phone lines and reduce toll costs of dialing between employees. Over time, the PBX has grown to incorporate all sorts of advanced features such as voicemail, Find Me Follow Me, Fax to Email, unified messaging, auto attendant (IVR), automatic call distribution (ACD), call queuing, remote office support, remote phones, softphones, CTI (integration with the PC), and more. With the advent of IP, the acronym PBX morphed into its latest incarnation, the IP PBX. An IP PBX is a PBX that supports packet-based transport protocols - commonly referred to as "VoIP". The most popular current protocol is SIP, which stands for "Session Initiation Protocol".

How do IP PBX phone systems save your business money?

An IP PBX allows a company to not only have phones in the office, but anywhere on the globe with an internet connection. This can drastically reduce a companies phone bills. Additionally open standard phones allow a company to retain the investment of their phones for many years in the future. Evolution PBX is packed with features that will make your company more efficient and more effective at communicating with your customers.

What is Asterisk open source software?

Asterisk is an open source communications engine that transforms commodity computers into powerful communications servers. Asterisk powers communications applications like IP PBXs and VoIP gateways. Because Evolution is built on Asterisk your PBX essentially is future proof. Thousands of programmers and companies actively contribute to the Asterisk code base insuring that it will always be a cutting edge phone system. Asterisk is unique in that it is interoperable with a huge number of devices and numerous protocols, including SIP, T1, E1, ISDN, PRI, FXO, and FXS.

If Asterisk is Open Source why does Evolution cost money?

Evolution is a front end GUI and back end configuration engine to make Asterisk easy to use. Additionally Evolution creates new features that are not available without massive programming efforts. Asterisk alone requires a very technical person versed in Linux, phone systems, and many other programming languages. Even with these skills to build the features packed in to Evolution would take a team of programmers tens of thousands of hours. Additionally our software has been out since 2005 and installed over 7000 times making it a very highly tested robust platform to place your companies most precious asset, your customers.