Welcome to the pre-Father’s Day, fortnight edition of VoIP Week-in-Review. In this edition we bring you two week’s worth of Voice over IP news highlights. Here’s hoping you have a big appetite, because there’s lots of news here, from companies like Mitel, Avaya, 8x8, Texas Instruments, Verizon, Nortel (News - Alert), and IBM.

 

So, let’s dive in with news from last week, and them move along to even more recent VoIP highlights.

 

We’ll start with a few reports from companies highlighting recent customer wins and business deals affecting the VoIP industry. First up is Intervoice’s (News - Alert) announcement of an expanded initial order for its Intervoice Media Exchange from a leading UK mobile service provider. The initial order was announced May 5; the additional order is estimated at $6.2 million.

 

The name of the UK service provider was not disclosed; Intervoice said the company requested anonymity due to competitive issues.

 

Common Voices also enjoyed a recent win: its NowMessage Unified Messaging platform was selected by Broadview Networks (News - Alert). The services running on NowMessage are branded as Broadspeed Message and will enable Broadview’s business customers to improve productivity with advanced features including voicemail, unified messaging, and text-to-speech services.

 

Internationally, Mitel recently helped out Caja Municipal de Sullana (CMAC Sullana), a leading microlending institution in Peru. The institution was forced to confront a common issue for microlenders: prohibitively high telephony operating expenses. The institution turned to Mitel to deploy a new, modern phone system across all its locations.

 

CMAC Sullana’s new phone system from Mitel ties together the head office and branches over a wide area network, thereby helping the lender reduce both administration costs and phone tolls (long-distance and local). The money saved is being used to finance self-employment and other local, economic development projects.

 

Now, back to the U.S. domestic front. New Jersey-based senior care provider Frances E. Parker Home recently decided to boost its corporate strategy of providing exceptional care. This required new tools for prompt and effective response to residents and their families.

 

The provider found those tools in an IP telephony network from Avaya. The new network was designed by Consolidated Technologies, Inc., a member of Avaya’s Business Partner Program, and is based on Avaya IP Office, a secure, easy-to-use converged voice and data system for small and medium offices.

 

Marketing happenings last week weren’t limited to individual customer wins, of course. In the realm of regional expansion, Mitel’s name pops up again. The company recently opened a new office in Rio de Janeiro to serve the Brazilian market. Mitel also appointed a general manager of Brazilian operations, Paulo Ricardo Pinto. Pinto brings more than 25 years experience in the Brazilian telecom market to his new position at Mitel. 

 

Frost & Sullivan analyst Ronald Gruia commented in Mitel’s announcement that Brazil represents the largest enterprise market for annual station shipments (TDM and IP) in the Caribbean and Latin America (CALA) region.

 

For NETGEAR, recent expansions have been focused on its solutions portfolio. One recent happening at the company was its rollout of a new NAS solution, based on technology the company acquired when it bought Infrant. Also recently, NETGEAR partnered with Avaya to resell that telecom leader’s one-x Quick Edition line of solutions. TMC President and Group Publisher Rich Tehrani spoke with the company’s Vice President of Marketing, Vivek Pathela, to get the latest scoop.

 

Meanwhile, Avaya recently celebrated an important milestone: more than 100,000 IP Office systems have now been sold to small and mid-sized organizations around the globe, serving an estimated 3.6 million users. Avaya IP Office is cost-effective, easy to use and especially designed for secure converged voice and data communications at small and mid-sized companies. 

 

Speaking of product expansion and achievement, Conference phones manufacturer ClearOne recently announced that its MAX IP and MAXAttach IP series of SIP-based VoIP conference phones are now interoperable with Cisco's SIP-based CallManager 5 IP telephony platform, as well as Nortel's MCS 5100 multimedia communication server.

 

The company also released a major firmware upgrade for its MAX IP products, which enabled these SIP interoperability milestones.

 

8x8, Inc., too, has been busy of late enhancing its solutions, and the effort paid off. It was recently named the most popular hosted VoIP provider among SMBs according to an AMI Partners report. Packet8 Virtual Office, which recently gained several new features, is now in use by more than 7,000 businesses in North America.

 

The new Virtual Office features include Microsoft Outlook integration. This feature lets users associate their Outlook contacts with their Virtual Office extensions; users can place calls by selecting the ‘call contact’ option for any contact with an associated number.

 

While 8x8 had its eye firmly on the hosted VoIP market, Sangoma was busy tinkering in the fax space. In the past, many businesses have attempted to bring faxing into the modern computing age by hooking fax machines to a PBX using a T1/E1 connection. This posed a problem, though: because the analog fax machine interface wasn’t synchronized with the PSTN timing, faxing worked inconsistently at best.

 

Now, this lack of synchronization has been eliminated. Sangoma announced what it claims is the industry’s first, cost-effective solution designed to support fax over PC-based T1/E1 digital phone systems.

 

Customer loyalty is, of course, necessary to succeed in any market. In a recent article, TMCnet special guest writer Dean Wiltse, Chairman and CEO at survey software company Vovici, discussed when and why customers stop shopping at a particular store. More specifically, he examined the move from traditional brick-and-morter stores to e-commerce, and customer retention rates for online retailers.

 

Finally, for last week’s VoIP highlights, here is a potentially very important piece of industry news: A federal appeals court upheld an FCC ruling that Vonage (News - Alert) and other VoIP providers must pay into the Universal Service Fund, which is used to subsidize phone and broadband services for rural areas, public institutions and poor neighborhoods.

Vonage challenged the FCC’s formula for determining the percentage VoIP providers must pay into the fund. This formula dictates that VoIP providers must pay a higher percentage of their long distance revenues, compared to traditional phone and wireless carriers, into the fund.

 

Okay, moving along to VoIP news highlights for this past week…

 

First up, let’s return to the topic of customers. Service oriented architecture (SOA) solutions provider BlueNote Networks announced this week that its SessionSuite solution is are now being used by WorldWinner (a subsidiary of FUN Technologies, Inc.) to provide Internet telephony services for its remote employee base.

 

WorldWinner, which provides online game competitions for cash and prizes, selected SessionSuite because of its scalable and feature-rich capabilities. The company is using the solution to extend its corporate voice services, via the Internet, to remote offices, teleworkers, and traveling employees.

 

Before we dive into the larger news block relating to portfolio expansion, we’d like to return for a moment to the topic of fax. speaking of fax… In recent years, communications technology generally has changed at a dizzying pace, with one exception: fax. Fax has stood the test of time and continues to universally employed as an integral part of business communication. But even fax, it turns out, has changed.

 

What’s changed with fax? A recent white paper from FaxBack answers this question. The paper draws attention to the workflow inefficiencies associated with traditional fax and shows how upgrading fax can result in more efficient and cost-effective business communications.  

 

This week, as last, a number of VoIP companies made announcements related to product enhancements and portfolio expansions. First up is Texas Instruments, better known in some circles simple as TI; the company announced this week expansion of its VoIP portfolio (yes, the company offers more than just calculators). That portfolio now includes the companies new IP Phone Product Suite, which leverages TI’s VoIP expertise and its digital signal processors.

 

TI’s new VoIP offerings provide real-time signal processing, low-power consumption, and a great deal of flexibility for next-generation VoIP devices. Manufacturers can now use TI’s products to deliver cost-effective IP phones for a variety of markets, including low-end enterprise, small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) and residential.

 

Meanwhile, Verizon’s Business IP network was expanded with a new function designed to make customers’ lives easier: free, click-to-call, PC-to-phone calls to regional businesses (think restaurants, hotels, car dealerships, etc.). This feature makes it easier for consumers to locate the local resources they need through Microsoft’s maps.live.com site.

 

The company said that this new feature is part of its strategic alliance with Microsoft, which involves developing and delivering next-generation services. The addition benefits both companies: Microsoft’s advertising partners get targeted leads, and Verizon customers have access to a new and potentially very valuable service.

 

While not exactly a portfolio expansion, Mitel’s increased focus on the business market fits in here nicely. The company recently began to more actively market its products to schools by showing how they can, affordably and in many cases using much of their existing equipment, design and implement effective emergency response systems.

 

To find out more about how Mitel is helping campuses become safer, TMCnet spoke with the company’s education solutions marketing manager, Vani Naidoo. Naidoo spoke about the capabilities Mitel’s products have, and how the company is putting them together in novel new ways to meet safety needs of schools.

 

Well, let’s see: Verizon and Microsoft teamed up to offer a new, online calling service; in a completely different area of the VoIP market, VoIP peering company XConnect announced this week a partnership with Telcordia (News - Alert) Technologies, which provides telecom software and services around the globe. The partnership involves both companies integrating and distributing their respective ENUM registry services, which includes private federations for IP communications peering and number portability.

 

Together, XConnect and Telcordia are working to speed up the worldwide adoption of VoIP and IMS-based services.

 

Speaking of partnerships, Nortel and IBM teamed up this week to create a new, complete unified communications solution that runs on a single system. The two companies are teaming up in response to market trends in the unified communications for small business market.

 

The new offering, dubbed Nortel-IBM System i Unified Communications, ties together IBM software and hardware with Nortel’s IP telephony and multimodal technology. Result? A single, robust, highly-scalable platform.

 

Ah yes, and speaking of unified platforms, let’s talk for a moment about the fact that many companies today find the benefits of IP communications appealing, but are locked into the previous technology investments they made. Since most businesses cannot afford to completely rip-and-replace their communications systems, they tend to see IP communications as beyond their grasp. There is a solution, though; it’s called a media gateway appliance.

 

A recent white paper by Dialogic explores how media gateway appliances can empower  companies add IP communications capabilities to their existing public branch exchange (PBX) system without breaking the bank. With a low upfront cost, a phased migration to IP communications can be started now, not at some unspecified time in the future.

 

While we’re on the topic of helping companies choose the right product, it’s worth noting that VendorGuru.com this week announced another way it’s helping companies choose the right business phone system: by offering a free Webinar. The upcoming Webinar will focus on how to make sense out of the wide array of VoIP and traditional phone systems available on the market today.

 

The Webinar, scheduled for June 20, will feature a panel of business owners describing how they chose their phone systems and how the systems have helped their business.

 

Yet another company that understands the importance of the right tool for the right job is business phone system provider Nuvio, which recently won an award from an industry publication for its nPBX solution. nPBX provides a full-service telecom system priced at a point affordable for small businesses.

 

The award was bestowed by IP World Magazine. Nuvio won that publication’s Top 10 PBX Provider Editors Choice Award. In a review of Nuvio’s solution, IP World praised the company’s nPBX BYOD and nPBX Unlimited packages for their scalability.

 

Speaking of awards, the IMS Forum announced this week plans to exhibit, speak and participate in the judging of the NXTcomm Eos Awards. The organization will be holding a meeting at the Hyatt Regency in McCormick Place in Conference Room CC11A on June 18, as NXTComm kicks off. Members have an opportunity to observe firsthand IMS Forum’s presentation of Plugfest II results and other recent activities.

 

Rounding out this week’s VoIP news highlights is an important announcement from Espial. With the IPTV market forecasted to grow nicely in the foreseeable future, Espial decided the time was right to go public with an IPO worth about $25 million (3,571,000 shares at $7 per). Being a pure-play IPTV solutions provider, the company is sitting pretty to take advantage of projected market growth.

 

The company has said it plans to use the IPO monies to expand its rapidly growing IPTV middleware business. To find out more, TMCnet president and group publisher Rich Tehrani communicated with Brian Mahoney, Espial’s vice president of marketing

 

That’s it—a fortnight of VoIP news highlights. Check back next Friday for more, and to all you dads out there, have a great weekend! (Well, the rest of you can have a good weekend too..)

 

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