By Sharla Sikes

VoIP provider Fonality announced the purchase of Insightful Solutions, a software distributor for customer relationship management platrofm SugarCRM.

The CRM merger will give Los Angeles-based Fonality the ability to offer customers its Asterisk PBX together with the CRM software from Insightful of Sydney, Australia, for a “unified solution” with communications and customer relationship tools especially suited for small and medium businesses. The solution will include employee presence management, instant messaging, fixed and mobile calling and “a single 360-degree view of customers and business partners.”

A version with basic click-to-call functionality is currently available as Fonality CRM, hosted at Fonality data centers for current PBXtra and trixbox Pro customers worldwide.

Insightful CEO Mac Englaro said a more extensive version with more functions will be released in 2008, according to VoIP News. This new version will incorporate more PBX and CRM integration, giving users better record-keeping and management ability. A record of calls—both outgoing and incoming—will be saved, and screen-pops will lead agents into the appropriate CRM screen for incoming calls. When the PBX is linked to the CRM system, inbound phone calls can be linked to the customer’s account and routed to the correct customer service agent.

 “Telephony and CRM have a naturally concentric relationship, so this is a 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,” said Chris Lyman, Fonality CEO, in a statement.

Insightful Solutions has been a long-time partner with SugarCRM Gold and helped to modify and improve SugarCRM’s code.

Fonality has not released the financial details of its acquisition, but has promised Insightful Solutions employees a position at Fonality.

“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. Together we’re going to continue to raise the bar for what people expect from bothVoIP and CRM,” said Marc Englaro, co-founder and CEO of Insightful, who has now been named as general manager of Fonality’s CRM Division.

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