When COVID-19 lockdowns began to have a serious impact on businesses around the world, Singapore-based Crux Labs was ready with a Raspberry Pi-based telecommunications product that would enable small and medium-sized enterprises to keep working remotely.

Rohit Gupta, CEO and founder of Crux Labs, noticed that while home communications technology had become well integrated, many small businesses were still using analog phone solutions, with no means of logging missed calls and following up on potential leads.

Crux Labs：https://crux-labs.com/

Many companies with fewer than 100 employees don’t have dedicated IT experts to maintain traditional PBX phone systems and integrated communications centers, and anyway, the cost of installation is prohibitive for many businesses of that size. Gupta founded Singapore-based Crux Labs to provide an easily accessible digital phone solution for small business owners up to about 250 employees.

Challenge

Crux Labs had to ensure that neither cost nor complexity would be a barrier for small businesses to build their first digital phone solution. Its customers needed a product that was easy to install, required minimal support, and could reliably deliver critical business functions.

Solution

Crux LX, Crux Labs' first SMB product designed for businesses ranging from small business owners to about 250 employees, is a digital phone solution with a Raspberry Pi 3 at its core. It uses SIP telephony and a wide area network to create a low-cost, scalable, device-agnostic and location-agnostic digital phone network. Features such as call rerouting allow for the consolidation of phone communications across multiple office locations and allow employees to answer calls from their home office as if they were at the company base.

Customer demand led Crux to develop their second digital phone product. Crux VX is a “call center in a box” that has all the features of Crux LX with the addition of real-time dashboards and call analytics reporting.

Why choose Raspberry Pi?

Crux Labs did some digging: after trying no fewer than eight other options, CEO Rohit Gupta said the Raspberry Pi was the clear choice. If Crux had gone with the standard business phone option, he believes it would have cost up to £300,000 just for one prototype. The powerful and low-cost Raspberry Pi 3 was perfect for mass adoption.

With the Raspberry Pi, the stable hardware is suitable for the approximately 800 software packages included in Crux LX, from tiny processing functions to UI overlays that ensure a user-friendly interface. The result is a high-quality product that can be set up in about 30 minutes in the hands of non-professionals.

For Crux's multinational corporate clients with offices in Singapore and India, as well as partners in dozens of countries around the world, this advanced Raspberry Pi-based system provides huge savings on international calls, at less than one-sixth the cost of comparable enterprise systems.

Result

When the COVID-19 lockdowns began to have a serious impact on businesses around the world in 2020, Crux Labs customers who were already using Crux LX reported that they were able to comfortably switch to remote working, with employees continuing to work from home, with no perceptible negative impact on the business. The Managing Director of FarEastFlora.com, a leading online florist in Singapore, noted that choosing a Raspberry Pi-powered system was "one of the smartest technology decisions we have ever made."

Currently, Crux Labs supports more than 10,000 users in 11 countries, and the product runs 24/7 without any hardware failures.