Innovation at ITExpo - Patton

At ITExpo in Las Vegas, Clark Richter of UCStrategies is joined by Ramon Felder, President and CEO, Western Operations, of Patton.

Patton announced a new product, the SNBX (Smart Node Branch Exchange), a plug-and-play appliance which comes preloaded with an IP PBX designed for small to medium businesses.

Clark Richter: Hi, this is Clark Richter with UCStrategies here at ITExpo in Las Vegas, joined by Ramon Felder from Patton. He is the CEO of their Western European Operations. So Ramon, please tell us a little bit about Patton for people who aren't familiar with your company.

Ramon Felder: Sure, Clark. Patton Electronics is a telecommunications equipment company, a manufacturer, and vendor. We have been in business for close to 30 years starting out with connectivity products, transmission products, DSL, remote access servers, etc. Today, a big part of our business is voice-over IP, voice-over IP gateways, session border controllers, we do quality of service routers, etc. So we are a part of many UC and voice-over IP installations in small and medium businesses.

Clark: That's great. Do you have any strategic partnerships?

Ramon: Yes - the end customer is always the small to medium business. We have two channels through which we are addressing this market. One is through service providers. The service provider is offering a business service to a small-to-medium business. He is using our products as a CPE to terminate his services on his own. On that side of the business, we are partnering with Softswitch and IMS system vendors, we are certified for example with Broadsoft as one of our key partners, but we are also working in a lot of installations with Genband with Cirpack, and Nokia-Siemens-Networks, etc.

That is the carrier side of the business, and on the enterprise side, so the company decides to have in-house voice-over IP or UC deployment, we are Lync certified. We are working with 3CX. We are working with a lot of Asterisk-based solutions and offers. So with close to 15 years of experience in voice-over IP, we have partnered with a lot of companies and we are working with pretty much anything.

Clark: Are there any key differentiators that you feel your product has versus other options in the marketplace?

Ramon: Our focus is really on business communication, but we have a full product line. We have close to over 200 different models, which suit all the different business sizes. We can do anything from two analog lines up to four T1/E1 lines, and then on the carrier side we go up to a thousand E1 lines. So, we have a full product line dedicated to business applications, and business means (that) you need a lot of reliability, the quality is really important. You need flexibility because every business is different and you need to be able to integrate into the existing infrastructure and the requirements of the site. So quality, reliability, flexibility, and of course support, as well. We provide free lifetime software updates and support for our products. So, that is an important part in getting a system started and the best total solution.

Clark: Any announcements that you are making here today at the show here in Las Vegas?

Ramon: Yes, we are just launching this new product here. We call it SNBX, Smart Node Branch Exchange. It's an appliance, which comes preloaded with an IP PBX from one of our partner companies, 3CX. It's designed for again small to medium businesses, maybe in the range from 20 to 100 seats and it is fully preprogrammed. So you do not need to worry about the OS installation, windows installation, or 3CX installation. You just plug it in. You set it up with the licenses that you need for the number of calls that you want in your installation. You add IP phones. You add gateways or SBCs and you are up and running. We actually have worked with our distribution partner to offer this solution bundle where we have a special offer that includes the SNBX, the phones and licenses to get you started with everything.

Clark: Well, that is great. Thanks for your time, Ramon.

Ramon: Thank you, Clark.