Voiceroute (www.voiceroute.org), a Singapore company which develops IP telephony software, has released an open source version of its Druid UCS (Unified Communications Server).

Druid Open Source Edition (OSE) is built on top of other proven open source projects such as Asterisk, Dovecot and Jabber. Designed from ground up, it is a rich AJAX-based Unified Communications application that organisations can easily deploy and use for their IP communications; combining voicemail, VOIP, mobile phone, faxes and instant messaging. It also supports a wide range of IP handsets, Asterisk-based hardware devices and gateways.

The team behind Druid: (From left) Chief Operating Officer Vikram Rangnekar, Mr Yong Ming Yong, and Chief Technology Officer Navin Kumar.

According to Mr Yong Ming Yong, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Voiceroute, enterprise communications is in disarray. Important customer calls are going to voicemail; companies have to deal with faxes separate from voice communications, and users are hindered by unintuitive interfaces and the prohibitive cost of IP migration. "Enterprise communications is broken," he said.

Druid OSE aims to solve these problems for both end-users and administrators by providing an open unified communications platform that improves their business productivity.

With Druid OSE, users can access all their communications - voicemail, faxes, instant messaging, web portal, mobile portal and even softphones like Skype - through a single unified login. Deploying IP handsets in a Druid environment is extremely simple - just plug the handset into the network and it will be automatically detected and configured.

All faxes and voicemails from users can be accessed through rich AJAX web user portal with a wide range of end user telephony applications. Users can also use Outlook or any other email client to check their voicemails and faxes along with emails.

The Druid OSE supports many different browsers and operations systems, and is built with a focus on manageability to facilitate deployment. Features that will benefit system administrators and integrators include plug-and-play provisioning for a wide range of IP handsets, a hardware wizard that auto-detects and configures Zapata hardware, and a VOIP trunk wizard which allows point-and-click configuration of SIP/IAX trunks from major VOIP providers.

In a demonstration to telecom blogger Tom Keating of the TMCnet magazine, Voiceroute took just 10 minutes to set up a complete working IP-PBX (Private Branch eXchange) system with auto-provisioning of IP phones from Cisco, Aastra, and Polycom.

According to Mr Yong, Druid OSE is particularly attractive to small and medium enterprises because it provides them with a secure and reliable communications solution without the pitfalls of proprietary vendor lock-in with high licensing fees and capital expenses.

So confident is Mr Yong of Druid OSE that he invites all comers to "test drive" the solution. "We offer trial licences which are full-featured and you can try and use every aspect of our product."