Boosting its offerings designed to enhance business communications and reduce costs telecom costs for companies, VoSKY this week its new VoSKY Exchange Pro solution. This solution is a turnkey PBX-to-Skype appliance that enables businesses to improve communications capabilities and lower costs at the same time. VoSKY Exchange Pro starts shipping in the fourth quarter of 2007.

With all the hype surrounding Unified Communications, Quintum Technologies’ vice president of marketing Chuck Rutledge posed this question as he opened his keynote address at INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO: “How Unified is Unified Communications?” The potential of Unified Communication, Rutledge said, is nothing short of amazing. But is UC really about changing the way we do business, or is just another over-hyped technology? The issue, Rutledge asserted, is the convergence gap that exists between voice and data applications.

CommuniGate Systems this week announced enhanced call control and calendar features for its Pronto! portable flash client. The company made the announcement during INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO West 2007. Version 1.2 of Pronto! offers a new “click-to-call” feature allowing users to make instant Internet calls from their SIP phones or soft clients with a simple click on their online contact list. The new version also features calendar management improvements.

Phone systems play an integral role in business performance and success. By improving phone systems with the advanced technologies available today, businesses are able to have efficient and effective communications. Phone systems are important to businesses as they are the most commonly used communications systems in business operations. With the hosted PBX in place, it is possible for business to reduce their expenses, as they do no longer need to pay fees to an outside telephone company.

Dialogic extended its market leadership in VoIP host media processing technologies and multimedia development platforms with its recent interface board and software releases. These products are designed and tested with conferencing and contact center solution developers. As a result, they are equipped to enable pure IP and hybrid media solutions.

As IPTV continues to expand and make it way further into the minds of mainstream audiences, finding new ways to leverage the technology is becoming more and more paramount. Companies today operating in the IPTV space are tasked with an overall goal of providing the best service to their customers while also keeping costs low. Espial will address this topic in an upcoming Webinar.

Voiceroute demonstrated the capabilities of its Asterisk-based VoIP platform at INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO West 2007. The company said its Druid Telephony Platform, designed for small to medium sized businesses, is the industry’s “first truly plug and play CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocal) based auto-provisioning of Cisco, Polycom and Linksys phones with additional VLAN based auto-provisioning of Aastra, Snom and GrandStream phones.”

BlueNote Networks thinks presence can be much, much more than static information people use to make decisions manually. The company this week announced that it is adding a new set of capabilities called Presence Service to its family of SessionSuite products. Essentially what the new capabilities do is let companies set up automated communications functions that use presence information to intelligently route calls and perform other business processes without human intervention.

Comverse announced the launch of MyCall Converged Communications for the American market. The announcement was made at the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo West 2007. MyCall Converged Communications delivers consumer telephony and messaging services with a unified user interface, over fixed broadband and mobile networks.

Norman Stout, CEO of Mitel US, the company formerly known as Inter-Tel, delivered a keynote address at ITEXPO this week. The speech, entitled “The New Force in Business Communication: A Look at the New Mitel,” explained the thought process behind this summer’s merger of Ottawa-based Mitel and Inter-Tel, the Phoenix, Ariz.-based enterprise communications solutions provider.

Broadcom has teamed with OpenTV Corp. to introduce next generation cable, satellite, IP and terrestrial-based set-top box products with advanced features and capabilities that enhance the end-user viewing experience OpenTV is leveraging Broadcom’s BCM7400 dual-channel AVC/VC-1/MPEG-2 video decoder, which features an advanced high performance processor and 3D animation.

Lenovo introduced its smallest and most energy efficient desktop PC to date, joining the growing movement in the technology industry to reduce the size of computer carbon footprints. The new desktop, dubbed ThinkCentre A61e, is the size of a telephone book with a 45-watt AMD Athlon 64 X2 and Sempron energy efficient processors. It uses only 45 watts of energy and can reduce annual energy costs by 35 percent.