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Aastra this week at ITEXPO in Los Angeles unleashed a flurry of news, including two new partnerships and a new software solution.

The company – a $1 billion business that has been around about 30 years and sells endpoints, IP PBX solutions and applications – has announced the Aastra (News - Alert) Connector, a software application that works with any Asterisk SIP phone. It is actually a PC-based application that lets a user click and search directories on his or her PC, and then click on them to initiate a call on the Asterisk-based SIP phone.

Aastra also disclosed this week that Graybar (News - Alert) will be distributing the Aastra MX-ONE Compact solution. Tim Whittington, executive vice president and general manager at Aastra, told TMCnet that the MX-ONE Compact is based on technology that Aastra got through its 2008 acquisition of Ericsson’s (News - Alert) business unit. The MX-ONE Compact is an IP PBX/SIP softswitch that scales to support between 50 and 50,000 endpoints, and brings all the enterprise-class features one would get in a larger system along for the ride.

Also at ITEXPO, Aastra revealed a new relationship with Telchemy (News - Alert). Going forward, Aastra will resell Telchemy’s LAN performance solution.

In addition to the MX-ONE Compact solution mentioned above, Aastra offers a variety of analog and digital endpoints, SIP endpoints, an open source Asterisk-based system, and a full suite of unified communications features including presence, voice recognition, unified messaging, unified call control and more – all of which is integrated with its IP PBX (News - Alert) solutions.

Whittington says in addition to a broad slate of open solutions that deliver a lot of features and allow users to scale, Aastra offers financial stability, which means it will be around for the long term.