Status
Who is Clearly IP Inc? That is the question we keep getting asked the last few months after we announced the forming of ClearlyIP. To answer this, I think we first have to take a step back and look at the history and roots of ClearlyIP.
In 2007 a little known project called FreePBX® was starting to get some traction as an Open Source front end to Asterisk®. It was a very typical open source project with no real foundation or company behind it and a lot of people contributing and helping the project foster. At that time most of the founders of ClearlyIP decided to start a company called Schmooze Com Inc to focus a commercial business around this awesome open source project and help foster it into the world-class software it is today.
In 2015 Schmooze Com Inc was sold to Sangoma Technologies, a publicly-traded company on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSX VENTURE: STC). The founders of Schmooze Com all joined the Sangoma team in senior roles including COO, VP of Software Engineering and VP of Operations along with other executive level roles. Over the next 4 years, they helped take Sangoma from a 12 million dollar a year company to 120 million. In 2019 the core Schmooze Com team decided it was time to go a new direction and left Sangoma and started ClearlyIP to get back to the Schmooze Com philosophy of customer first and innovation of products.
Now that we have some history out of the way, let’s talk about who we are. We are a group of technology people who love to have fun and want to focus on a space we feel is not getting enough attention in the Open Source Telecom industry which is the Partners. Typically Open Source projects and software are embraced by the technology savvy guys building businesses around the product and offering services to customers. We feel there is a big void for your every day IT/Networking consulting shop who is not being served well in the Open Source space and are forced to either learn the in-depth inner workings of the Open Source software before they will feel comfortable using it with customers, or are forced to buy a commercial solution that may use the open-source products in the backend. We want to change this.
Our goal is to provide software enhancements to the Open Source projects they use every day from things like phones that can be rebranded under their company name with very minimal extra cost, to managing updates on their FreePBX based systems. We also have a lot of background in the provisioning of endpoints such as phones and have been working day and night at getting a cloud-based provisioning service built that we can launch later this year along with Customer-friendly SIP Trunking platform that is easy to sell and easy to manage. All of our products are designed to be Partner friendly and provide maximum margins for our partners.
We have lots of ideas for products that we plan on building in the future but those things are for another day and will require direction and feedback from our customers and partners on where they also feel they are being underserved. For now, we just wanted to say hello and we look forward to product launches in the next couple of months. Please use our contact form to contact us with feedback on anything that comes across your mind.
If you would like more information on becoming a ClearlyIP Partner please review our Partner Overview page and fill out our simple Partner Application to get started here.
FreePBX and Asterisk are registered trade marks of Sangoma Technologies
