The acquisition is part of a Fonality initiative to create the industry’s first phone system that unifies both telephony and CRM for small and medium sized businesses.
Insightful Solutions is one of the world’s largest SugarCRM development companies and is a SugarCRM Gold partner for the Australia-New Zealand and Asia Pacific regions.
SugarCRM is a commercial open source customer relationship management software platform.
Over the past two years, Insightful has made substantial enhancements to SugarCRM and hosts more than one thousand seats in 13 countries at the company’s three global data centres. By combining Insightful’s CRM expertise with Fonality’s telephony suite, small businesses will have an affordable solution that unifies employees with presence management, instant messaging, fixed and mobile calling, and provides a single 360 degree view of customers and business partners.
“Fonality has over 1,000 hybrid-hosted call centres deployed in 25 different countries and our hybrid-hosted platform is a powerful framework for delivering integrated applications directly to the SMB with no investment in premise equipment required,” said Fonality chief executive Chris Lyman.
“Telephony and CRM have a naturally concentric relationship, so this is good place to leverage hybrid-hosted and we are thrilled that the great folks at Insightful have joined forces with us to accelerate our unified offering to the global SMB marketplace,” Mr Lyman.
As part of the deal, Fonality will also begin selling Insightful’s SugarCRM managed service offering immediately, branded FonalityCRM.
Insightful co-founder and chief executive Marc Englaro has been appointed general manager of Fonality’s CRM Division. Before founding Insightful, Englaro was Director and Principal Consultant with Si2, leading its open source consulting practice. He will remain in his role as director of Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA), the country’s national industry body for open source adoption.
Insightful’s Australian team of CRM development and marketing experts have all taken positions with Fonality. The Insightful offices in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore will remain open.
“In Fonality we found a like-minded team which values going beyond simple integration, and building fully conjoined products that expand the definition of what’s on the market today,” said Englaro.
“Together we’re going to continue to raise the bar for what people expect from both VoIP and CRM.”
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