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If you had told me that Vonage (News - Alert) was going to be a business VoIP powerhouse three years ago, I would have trouble believing you.  The company's latest financial results and its continued acquisition of smaller business VoIP companies speak for themselves.   Other cloud VoIP players are going to have to decide if they are going to sit tight or think about consolidating.

Last week, Vonage reported first quarter 2015 adjusted EBDITDA of $38 million, the highest in 13 quarters.  The results include 49 percent year over year organic revenue growth at Vonage Business, including contributions from last year's acquisition of Telesphere (News - Alert).   In the first quarter of 2014, the company had 196,000 business seats.  For 2015, it's 338,000 seats.

Next quarter, SimpleSignal (News - Alert) will be included on Vonage Business results, with acquisition of SimpleSignal closing on April 1, 2015. Vonage has made no secret it is putting more money into business services and plans to tighten up on the number of consumer customers it has in order to lower churn and increase profitability.  It believes it can grow business revenue in 2015 on a 40 percent basis.

If financials weren't enough to excite Wall Street and company watchers, Vonage also announced it is acquiring gUnify, a company that integrates cloud communications with SaaS business applications, including Google (News - Alert) for Work, Zendesk, Salesforce's Sales Cloud, Clio and other CRM solutions.  Vonage says it will be able to better address the needs of larger SMBs by enabling them to extend their unified communications to core business applications.

The interesting thing around gUnify is it plays in Google Chrome as well as works with mobile devices and desktop phones, with a presence in the legal market via "deep " integration with Clio.  Acting as a big middleware platform, gUnify ties together Broadsoft-based cloud services with its middleware to the aforementioned SaaS business applications, including mail, storage, archiving, calendar, and document usage.  Since Broadsoft stopped buying companies a while back, Vonage looks to be a big winner with this acquisition.

More acquisitions may be in the pipeline.  Vonage is currently engaging in a four year stock repurchase plan, making it more valuable.  Between that, cash flow, and over $52 million in cash on the books, the company certainly has enough assets to buy a few more companies between now and the end of the year.

In the sometimes confusing world of SMB players, Vonage has good momentum and great name recognition.  Its' biggest threat at the moment is probably Microsoft (News - Alert) and the local cable companies, the former wanting to put everyone on its Azure cloud platform, while local cable is content to suck up all the SMB business Tier 1 telcos AT&T and Verizon have effectively let languish. 

How Vonage fares against different segments depends on where you want to draw the dividing lines.  Ooma hasn't geared up to grab a hold of larger small businesses, content to pluck off the 2-10 seat customers from larger providers.  It's got a lot of interesting technology and patents -- an area where Vonage likes to brag as well.  A combination of Vonage and Ooma would be fascinating if you could integrate Ooma's hardware and network with Vonage's network, larger business services, and software.