Fonality (News - Alert) has announced that it is acquiring Insightful Solutions, a distributor of SugarCRM-based customer relationship management (CRM) software, to create the industry’s first phone system that unifies both telephony and CRM for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB).

Insightful has been a SugarCRM Gold partner for some time, and has been active in modifying and improving SugarCRM's code. It hosts more than 1,000 seats throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

With this Fonality + Insightful/SugarCRM solution, customers will benefit from a unified solution that connects employees with presence management, instant messaging, fixed and mobile calling, and provides a single 360-degree view of customers and business partners.

“Telephony and CRM have a naturally concentric relationship, so this is a good place to leverage hybrid-hosted and we are thrilled that the great folks at Insightful have joined forces with us to accelerate our unified offering to the global SMB marketplace,” said Chris Lyman, Fonality CEO, in a statement.

 Los Angeles-based Fonality has not disclosed financial details of the deal. All it said is every employee of Insightful will continue to work for Fonality.

Upon close of the transaction, Fonality will begin selling Insightful’s CRM managed service along side its own services.

As expected, Fonality will leverage Insightful’s knowledge and experience supporting Sugar Professional deployments, as well as its own support infrastructure.

“In Fonality we found a like-minded team which values going beyond simple integration, and building fully conjoined products that expand the definition of what’s on the market today. Together we’re going to continue to raise the bar for what people expect from both VoIP and CRM,” said Marc Englaro, co-founder and CEO of Insightful, who has now been named as general manager of Fonality’s CRM Division.