Is Dell (Nasdaq: Dell) the next big name to enter the cloud computing fray? The company's Force 10 Networks data center acquisition earlier this year hinted strongly at its interest. Now, the long-time PC retailer is following through on the product and service front, according to eWeek. The publication noted that Dell made new cloud-related announcements this week at both the Salesforce.com Dreamforce event and the VMworld 2011 conference, the latter of which the entire cloud sector appears to have attended.

Dell said at VMworld that it is hard at work on a public cloud offering with VMware that is set to debut sometime later this year, with Dell data centers hosting VMware's vCloud public cloud systems. One of those data centers already is open in Plano, Tex., and several others are in the works. This effort targets mostly the small and medium-sized business market, where Dell has built strong customer relationships.

Dell and VMware also plan to build private cloud infrastructures for other companies, according to the eWeek story. Dell systems already are in place as components of other companies' public cloud services, too, such as those operated by Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN).  In addition, Dell and VMware next year plan to offer Microsoft Azure and open-source public cloud offerings, and continue integrating more Dell software and applications into the cloud. Analysts have been largely supportive of Dell's cloud moves, eWeek reported.

At Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event, Dell and the event's host announced a partnership aimed at offering software as a service application under the brand of Dell Cloud Business Applications. The first of these applications, a new CRM app, became available at the conference from Dell cloud integrator partner Boomi.

For more:
-see this eWeek story

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Talk about a turnaround. Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), which just a couple of days ago was setting new 52-week lows on what seemed like a daily basis, today has rebounded some $2.39 (as of late morning) and popped above $16 for the first time since a brief bubble for a few days in July.

What a difference a "not-bad" earnings report makes (see related story).

Cisco yesterday said it earned $1.2 billion, 22 cents per share, in Q4, and had sales of $11.2 billion. Take out the roughly $1 billion in restructuring costs and adjusted earnings came in 2 cents above Wall Streets expectations of 38 cents per share. None of it was ground breaking in any sense, but they were better than analysts expected.

During Cisco's earnings call, CEO John Chambers didn't spend a great deal of time talking about how great a job the company had done in selling its routers and switches during the quarter. Instead, he focused on what the "next Cisco" had to do to keep ahead of its prime competition, HP and Juniper Networks, which have been nipping at its heels and taking share from it in both of its core business segments.

"Since the last quarter's conference call, we've made solid progress on our comprehensive action plan to position ourselves for the next stage of growth and profitability, what we will call the next Cisco," Chambers said. "In terms of Q4 FY 11 overall guidance, we accomplished what we outlined in our Q3 conference call, achieving a little bit more in revenue growth and earnings per share than consensus' expectations."

Chambers said the company had "moved very rapidly" on its plan to simplify and focus its business, reorganizing its sales, engineering, services and operations organization, providing clear line of sight, accountability, and accelerating the speed of decisions.

Chambers also delivered on his vow in May to chop operating expenses by $1 billion; the company will use the savings to fund innovation and "achieve value for our shareholders."

But the normally upbeat exec also used the call to prepare analysts for what he called an uncertain economic environment, one he thinks the company is now in a better position to deal with than some of its competition.

"Many of our peers are now experiencing the same challenges in network capital spending, the public sector and the macro environment," Chambers aid. "We believe the changes that we implemented well ahead of our peers would now be a competitive advantage for us as we go forward in this uncertain macro environment."

And, he said, the company plans more changes through the year.

"It would be very easy to rest upon the changes that we've already made and continue to gradually evolve our company for the future," he said. "That is clearly what we will not do. We will continue to accelerate and drive through the simplification process at an even faster pace. We believe that this is an ongoing process in terms of our simplification goals, not lasting several quarters but several years."

Cisco has been losing share to HP and Juniper Networks, its products have been criticized as being over priced, and its business criticized as being unfocused.

But not everyone had given up on the company, even before its earnings report.

Goldman Sachs analyst Simona Jankowski in July went against the tide, telling customers "Cisco is not a broken franchise." Similarly, Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu wrote in a research note that "Cisco's market-share losses have been overestimated."

Whatever the case, the networking giant appears to have at least made enough of an impact yesterday to earn another quarter of support, but perhaps it is too early to start celebrating a "Turnaround of the Year" award. Or not.--Jim

VoIP is spreading from the fixed-line world to the mobile world. Usage is on the rise creating significant opportunity for mobile VoIP gateway equipment suppliers as expenditures in this space are expected to soar beyond the $6 billion mark in 2015, says In-Stat.

Freescale has introduced a comprehensive silicon and software solution for the rapid creation of multi-service business gateway (MSBG) equipment combining services such as data, security, voice and fax. Based on the QorIQ P1020 processor, the solution integrates Freescale’s VortiQa Security Application Software and D2 Technologies’ embedded vPort VoIP software, as well as virtualization support from Green Hills Software.

Well, we knew all that VoIP growth had to be coming from somewhere. Looks like XO Communications has been doing their part. They've just announced that they've surpassed one million business VoIP end-users using their services.

The XO IP Flex VoIP service which was launched in 2005 has hit one million users securing its position as one of the most widely deployed business VoIP services in the industry. According to Frost and Sullivan's North American VoIP Access and SIP Trunking Services Market Report, XO is the market leader in business VoIP end users with over 22 percent of the market.

A fun fact mentioned in the release: when you consider the U.S. population 1 in 300 people uses XO VoIP services. Not bad!

For more:
- read the release

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XO uses BroadWorks VoIP platform to deliver new enterprise SIP

Avaya and Skype have announced a strategic agreement to deliver communications and collaboration solutions to businesses of all sizes. The multi-phase deal includes both go-to-market and a joint technology integration.

Skype has announced the introduction of the Skype Channel Partner Program to help businesses who are looking to use Skype for their collaboration and communication needs. According to Skype, the goal of the program is to establish a qualified network of channel partners in the United States that can assist companies interested in using Skype “to improve their productivity and optimize their communication costs.”

Skype on Monday announced the official launch of Skype Connect 1.0, formerly known as Skype for SIP. Previously available in beta, Skype Connect delivers a business solution that enables IP-enabled private branch exchange (PBX) or Unified Communications systems to connect to Skype.

In the current economic environment, home-based businesses (HBBs) in the U.S. are increasingly turning to the web to boost business. According to a report from AMI-Partners, VoIP is playing an increasingly prominent role in the survival of the HBB.

Getting a bit meta, Infonetics released a report on its reports! But rather than rehashing all the stuff they've been saying, they've taken their most recent reports on the VoIP markets and tried to come up with some trends reflected across all their findings. One of their main findings? The economic hurt is over and VoIP is back in business.

Specifically VoIP is back for business as one of the major trends Infonetics has picked up on is the uptick in business VoIP sales. While residential VoIP has remained stable, business VoIP saw some growth at the end of 2009 and into 2010. In addition, service providers were reporting that interest in hosted VoIP was up across all business classes. The research firm expects business VoIP to make up a third of the VoIP service revenue by 2014. If that's not exciting enough for you, they also predict the unified communications (UC) market will top $1 billion by 2013.

"The enterprise telephony market was hit hard in 2009 due to the recession, but based on the latest quarterly shipment figures and results from our March 2010 survey of North American enterprises about IP PBX spending, it appears that the bleeding has stopped and 2010 promises to be a better year, good news for vendors and service providers alike," notes Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise voice and data at Infonetics Research in the release.

For more:
- read the release

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Google's Enterprise President Dave Girouard explained in an interview with eWeek that Google has been building on its business app suite and will launch an enterprise version of Google Voice later this year--a combination of applications that may prove disruptive to the Unified Communications (UC) market. With Google's cloud based applications highly collaborative already, and with the combination of Google Voice, Talk, and Gizmo5, Google has the makings of a unified communications app bundle that could be as cheap, easy to use and ubiquitous as its search engine and email offerings.

Later this year, Girouard said, Google would release a version of Google Voice for businesses, but he did not go into specifics about a timeline. At the moment, Google Voice has 1.4 million users routing calls through the service. Currently, Google Apps has 2 million business customers paying only $50 per user a year to use the software suite. As Google continues to develop and launch its VoIP play, they will have a built-in business audience to offer their services.

For more:
- read this article

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2010: The Year of Google VoIP?

VoIP penetration among US businesses will increase rapidly over the next few years, reaching 79% by 2013, compared to 42% at the end of 2009, reports In-Stat. This penetration reflects companies having a VoIP solution deployed in at least one location.

VoIP has been around for several years in various forms, but is now extremely popular amongst both business and home users as broadband speeds have increased and VoIP has become widely used.

It is not just larger businesses that can benefit from VoIP services, as there are many companies and operators who cater specifically to the requirements of small and medium enterprises. If you want to switch your entire telephone system over to VoIP you can choose a full package from a variety of sources.

Now that Skype has made nice with its founders and secured its underlying code base, things are looking up for the Skype business play.

Last week Joltid and Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis ended their litigation against Skype and joined the investor group and the Skype board with a 14 percent share in the company. They got this deal in exchange for handing over the essential Joltid software that Skype runs on as well as a cash investment in the company. With the end of its legal woes and the necessary software safe in its hands, Skype for Business is looking a little more stable. Irwin Lazar, an analyst with Nemertes Research told Network World that he'd be a lot more interested in the corporate use of Skype even after just a month ago he was advising businesses to stay away.

Lazar pointed out recent moves like Skype for SIP as well as Skype's moves to get their offerings working with IP PBX vendors' gear will go a long way in bringing SMBs to their door as it would take a lot of the frustration out of setting up SIP as well as offer some serious cost-savings by switching to Skype.

For more:
- read this article

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Junction Networks, a business and hosted VoIP provider targeting the SMB market, announced the addition of IM, presence and phone to its browser-based telephony offering OnSIP. The new offering, called my.OnSIP, monitors whether contacts on the hosted IP-PBX are available and provides enterprise-only IM to reduce distractions.

The new capabilities are available for any user on the hosted platform, including distributed employees, according to Junction.

Junction said its business customers need only provide IP phones, and it handles the rest of the networking. The company is also opening the new client to developers who would like to integrate these functions into applications for real-time communications.

"True, some on-premise PBX vendors offer chat, presence, and maybe even phone status," Junction Networks' President Robert Wolpov said to Voxilla. "But they often charge considerably extra for these non-voice media, and they often require proprietary phone sets."

The company said the new features will be added at no extra charge to the OnSIP hosted service, which begins at $39.95 per month, according to Voxilla. 

For more:
- see the Voxilla article here
- see the Junction press release here 

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Guest Commentary: Rob Wolpov

Skype is aggressively targeting the small to medium-sized business market with its Skype for SIP offering. As Om Malik points out, Skype's announcement of interoperability with Cisco's widely deployed Unified Communications 500 system is indicative of a larger move by the company to attempt to win significant share in the business telephony market, as it has done in the consumer space.

Skype, which has already announced interoperability with ShoreTel and SIPfoundry sipXecs, offers businesses a clear value proposition with its cheap international calling, its free Skype-to-Skype calls, and its video chat options. But Malik says that's about the only thing Skype has over competitive offerings, and hinted that the VoIP calling service needed to add features and improve reliability to overcome negative initial reaction to the Skype for SIP product.

With voice becoming increasingly commoditized, Skype has to see the writing on the wall for the margins of its consumer VoIP offering. While it needs its gigantic 480 million-strong user base to attract business customers via scale and to deliver cost savings from call volume economy, the price it can charge for SkypeIn and SkypeOut minutes will continue to decrease, especially as new, powerful entrants like Google undercut Skype on price.

Enter the Skype enterprise play, which if developed correctly, could begin to deliver recurring revenue to offset any decline in the consumer business. If, of course, it can overcome its stigma as being too unreliable and a pure "value" play. 

Skype also announced this week that it will offer a Skype Service Partner Program to begin a concerted channel play. Skype Chief Strategy Officer Christopher Dean said the influence of channel advisors and consultants made a channel offering crucial to Skype's play in enterprise.

"Saving money is just the start of what we do for customers," Dean told PhonePlus. "Skype is much more than voice."

Skype will have to prove that its business offering is indeed more than voice to experience significant uptake and the revenue that would follow. But as its overwhelming success in gaining consumer adoption has shown, a bet against the company should be made with caution.

- Pete

Skype is aiming to woo more business users, as it announced a major advertising buy with CNN International targeting this market. The deal, which covers CNN viewers in EMEA, Asia, and Latin America, will see Skype sponsor a segment entitled "Connector of the Day" on the CNN show "Connect the World." Skype's exclusive advertising content will also run on the show's Internet properties, as well as alongside the program on TV.

"This is an exciting opportunity that allows us to reach a highly relevant audience and increase awareness of the benefits of Skype," Neil Stevens, the general manager of consumer business at Skype, told the Guardian. Skype's corporate parent eBay sold 65 percent of the company to private investors last week. The business market is one of the areas analysts think could drive Skype's revenues.

For more:
- see the Guardian article here 

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Verizon Business announced this week a new IP-based interactive voice response product based on a Nuance Communications' offering that will provide improved speech recognition capabilities to Verizon Business customers currently using its hosted TDM IVR service. Verizon told Telephony that the new offering allows applications to leverage the speech recognition of the platform to access caller history and information. If the caller requests an agent, the system uses SIP trunking to connect them, or uses the legacy TDM system if the IP network is overloaded.

Verizon said the new hosted offering allows customers to migrate to an IP environment gradually, as they transition back-end systems and workforce to the new platform.

For more:
- see the Telephony article here 

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Suddenlink Communications' subscriber base may pale in comparison to large cable MSOs (it's actually the eighth largest U.S.-based MSO), but the service provider has been making progress with its IP voice offerings for business and residential customers. The MSO announced this week that it now has over 250,000 active residential and business voice customers, up from a scant 30,000 subscribers only two years ago when it offered the service in only some of its markets. Today, its customers are making and receiving an average of up to 6 million calls daily over its private, managed IP-based network.

"Our phone service is increasingly popular, as more customers realize they can get the same, or in many cases better, quality of service than they've enjoyed in the past for substantially less money," said Suddenlink chief operating officer Tom McMillin in a statement. 

For more:
- CED has this article

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Our sister publication FierceTelecom got an interview with Verizon Business president Fran Shammo this week that touched on a number of relevant topics, including the division's hosted VoIP business, security plays, and overall business communications services spending. Shammo sees strong growth in the hosted VoIP business, and he said while business services volumes are decreasing and equipment purchases are down, the focus on cost savings has opened discussions in other areas of Verizon Business' markets. 

For more:
- see the full interview here

Fresh off raising a $15 million round of venture funding, business VoIP provider Telesphere announced it has purchased the VoIP services business of Unity Business Networks, which operates in Colorado, Orgeon and Minnesota. While financial terms were not disclosed, a Telesphere spokesman said the deal was worth several million dollars and expands Telesphere's operations to all 50 U.S. states. He also claimed the acquisition makes Telesphere the 3^rd largest provider of hosted VoIP services in the U.S.

"This acquisition roughly doubles the marketplace for Telesphere," said Jeff Kagan, a telecom industry analyst based in Atlanta. "Telesphere is becoming a fast-growing IP phone and Internet service provider aimed at the Hosted VoIP and Managed IP PBX marketplace for business customers."

The transaction is expected to close either in the third or fourth quarter this year. 

For more:
- see the press release here 

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Russian lawmakers and a business group claim VoIP companies are causing unfair competition for domestic mobile network operators and telcos, according to a New York Times report. Members of Russia's Parliament and the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (now that doesn't sound Soviet) are considering floating a law that would ban or severely restrict VoIP companies from operating in Russia.

The union is lobbying on behalf of Russian MVNO MegaFon, one of the largest mobile network operators in the country, and it claims services like Skype should be restricted because they are foreign entities taking revenue from domestic telephony operations. A vice president of another Russian telephony player, TransTelKom, will head a panel to discuss the terms and conditions of the proposed legislation.

While the revenue loss is likely the root cause of the proposed protectionist regulation, its proponents also said VoIP companies, mentioning Skype explicitly, could pose a security threat and need to be governed more closely. The committee said it plans to release its recommendations in about two months. 

For more:
- see the New York Times article here

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Tadiran Telecom has signed a distribution agreement with Teledata Technologies in a collaboration aimed at targeting "vast" VoIP opportunities in the African telecom market.
The IP business telephony and communications supplier has also announced the appointment of Zeev Aviv as acting President and CEO. Until recently, he served as VP Sales and Marketing.

sipgate has launched a new and entirely web-based service version of its US telephony service that replaces both phone systems and phone lines.
The VoIP company said that its "Team Edition" will allow small and mid-size companies to move their corporate phone service to the cloud. It provides each employee with online access to their inbox containing phone logs, faxes, recordings and voicemail messages.

RingCentral, a self-described "cloud computing based phone service provider," announced RingCentral Office, which provides voice services for a fixed monthly rate without a contract or start-up fees. The service, which the company claims is the first online, self-service offering for small businesses to buy and set up phone systems, comes with four hosted voice lines, hosted fax, call routing, unlimited long distance and pre-configured phones, according to the company's release.

"The fact that RingCentral offers a unique self-service capability with an all inclusive pricing model and no contracts is, frankly, quite revolutionary in the business phone systems market," IDC senior analyst David Lemelin said in the release.

The four-line service will list for $99.99 per month, with additional lines available for $24.99 per month, according to the company. 

For more:
- see the press release here 

Related article
RingCentral adds voice to hosted PBX platform