Twilio's OpenVBX Expands Open Source Business Telephony

The world of open source solutions for business telephony keeps getting surprisingly more sophisticated.For example, Twilio Cloud Communications has had an open API for telephony applications for some time, but this week has announced OpenVBX, targeted at delivering Google Voice-like features and PBX-like solutions to businesses. It's actually just one of a number of open source business telephony solutions showing lots of sophistication.

OpenVBX is a full suite of tools for managing virtual phone numbers, building business telephony apps, creating applets for auto-attendants, call forwarding, voicemails (with transcription), receiving text messages and more. It's positioned as much less expensive and more flexible than popular business call-routing solutions, and you can either integrate it with an existing solution or create one from the ground up. OpenVBX works with Twilio's call services, priced at $1 per phone line per month, and calls charged at 3 cents per minute. Still, it's a very affordable solution compared to expensive PBX systems.

Of course, speaking of PBX systems, we've covered one of the most sophisticated open source PBX-replacement platforms before: Asterisk. With Asterisk, any computer can become a voice communications server, and there is also very inexpensive subscription support for it.

Business telephony is costly stuff. It's clear at this point, though, that both large enterprises and smaller businesses can get access to good, free telephony platforms complemented by low service rates and cheap support. You can go through a guided walkthrough of OpenVBX here.