IP-PBX provider Sphere Communications (News - Alert) announced Monday that it has received Frost & Sullivan’s 2007 Product Differentiation Innovation Award for the North American enterprise telephony system market. The company was recognized for its achievements providing service oriented architecture (SOA)-based telephony solutions and its work developing niche delivery models as a differentiation strategy.

 

One of the ways Sphere differentiates itself from competitors is through its flagship telephony solution, the Sphericall IP-PBX (News - Alert). Sphere adds extra value to the Sphericall solution by offering an associated service development kit (SDK) to OEMs, ISVs and application developers. The SDK enables such developers to easily integrate Sphericall into existing applications and communications systems.

 

“Being one of the first in the market with IP PBX technology that can act as a business application in a service-oriented architecture, Sphere Communications is years ahead of even some of the top vendors in the market,” Frost & Sullivan analyst Krithi Rao said, in a statement.

 

Rao continued: “With the importance of communications-enabled business processes growing in the market, Sphere's architecture differentiation may become the company's strongest competitive advantage.”

 

Sphericall is a software-based IP-PBX designed to operate on industry-standard operating systems and servers. This enables companies to purchase just the telephony software from Sphere, and use it with existing equipment obtained from other IT partners. Although it’s future-focused on IP, though, Sphericall is not only an IP-enabled solution. It also works in hybrid legacy/IP environments. Companies operating on the hybrid model can use Sphere’s full line of enterprise-class, voice media gateways or opt for similar hardware from third-party vendors.

 

Rao had high praise for Sphere’s  flexible approach to delivering twenty-first century communications functionality: “Where many vendors provide multiple components to enable new communication services such as presence, text messaging, voice, video, unified messaging, etc., Sphere has integrated these into a common software engine that is designed to be distributed across the enterprise.”

 

Continuaing, Rao added: “This approach provides more value for less money, makes the solution quite easy to deploy and manage, and provides a level of resiliency that cannot be achieved through centralized or clustered approaches.”

Underlying Sphericall is Sphere’s core telephony engine, SphereCSE. This engine is designed to align with SOA initiatives that allow rich communications features to be leveraged by other business systems. The openness of SphereCSE is helping Sphere both differentiate itself in the marketplace, and attract new channel partners.

 

“Enterprise communications is transitioning rapidly to software-based business applications,” said Todd Landry, senior vice president at Sphere, in a statement. “We’re pleased to see the execution of our strategy aligning so well with the evolution of the marketplace, and are even more pleased to have an organization like Frost & Sullivan recognize Sphere for our innovation.”

 

Each year, Frost & Sullivan recognizes one company in each of a variety of markets that best demonstrates innovative products and an effective differentiation strategies. A variety of factors are considered in selection of Best Practices award winners, including leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic development.

 

To learn more about Sphere’s Sphericall IP-PBX, please visit the company’s TMCnet.com channel, IP-PBX.

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Mae Kowalke previously wrote for Cleveland Magazine in Ohio and The Burlington Free Press in Vermont. To see more of her articles, please visit Mae Kowalke’s columnist page. Also check out her Wireless Mobility blog.