Agito, the enterprise FMC vendor selling direct to enterprises, has raised $13 million in Series B. The startup has focused on verticals such as Higher Education, Manufacturing/Retail, Healthcare, and Energy/Utilities. Over 12 customers have implemented Agito solution so far.
PBX integration has been a major issue resulting in delays in enterprise FMC deployments. PBX makers take a long time in the certification process. Agito has so far achieved integration of its product with IPPBXs from Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, Asterisk, and Microsoft OCS. There is tighter integration with Cisco products. To date the company has not announced any OEM relationship.
Agito solution is supposed to have advantages related to scalability. Its solution has native integration into WLAN systems, Active Directory and LDAP directory stores. Although the solution extends PBX features over to mobile handsets, it is focussed more on the voice handover part.
There are very few startup FMC vendors out there that sell direct to enterprises. In fact DiVitas is the only other company that comes to mind.
PBX vendors are known to have certain reservations working with the FMC vendors because such a set up could have an impact on the desk phone business of the PBX vendors. Agito claims that its equipment typically augments the end-user IP desk phone rather than replacing it. It can potentially increase the number of line appearances on the PBX and the licenses required, leading to additional revenue.
For those customers who do replace the IP desk phone with the mobile phones, this revenue loss could potentially be offset by the increase in license revenue required to enable the mobile phone on the IPPBX.