21/05/2012 - RedSky releases cloud-based hosted E911 solution
Enhanced 911 services provider RedSky Technologies announced that its flagship product, E911 Manager Version 6, is now available as a hosted, cloud-based service.
The E911 solution integrates with major call servers/PBXs to track detailed location data from a range of phones on the enterprise network, including analog, digital, SIP, H.323, WiFi and softphones. The application automatically updates the location information used by emergency-service dispatchers at public safety answering points (PSAPs) throughout the nation.
E911 Manager works with platforms including Avaya, Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Siemens (NYSE: SI) and supports SIP endpoints and voice platforms, Chicago-based Red Sky said.
In addition to hosting on RedSky's private cloud, the automated E911 solution can be deployed on-premises, in a virtual environment or on a dedicated server.
RedSky SVP Nick Maier said offering E911 Manager as a hosted service provides deployment options to organizations that seek automated E911 protection.
"We are witnessing a major transition of enterprise applications moving to the cloud," Maier said. " We believe an increasing number of organizations will take advantage of E911 in the cloud to help manage their capital expenditures and IT staffing costs."
RedSky's E911 Manager is built on a Java/Linux platform that allows scalability and meets uptime requirements of enterprise applications, the company said.
For more:
- see this release
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21/05/2012 - NetVersant takes off with Houston airports
Hometown vendor NetVersant Solutions has signed a five-year deal with the Houston Airport System (HAS) to provide telecommunications services for three Houston airports--George Bush Intercontinental, William P. Hobby and Ellington.
The Houston Airport System is the fourth-largest U.S. airport system and the world's sixth largest, with a system that served more than 49.5 million passengers in 2010, including more than 8.5 million international travelers, the company said.
NetVersant's key business areas are network infrastructure, integrated security solutions, enterprise communications, mobility solutions and environmental monitoring and control, the company said.
"NetVersant Solutions has the infrastructure and capabilities to support the mission critical communications network within HAS," the airport system's technology services manager, Frederick McDowell, said in a statement.
For more:
-see the release
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02/04/2012 - Genband pushes into enterprise communications market with UC, SIP solutions
Genband has usually been known as an IP infrastructure solutions provider, but it has announced it will jump into the enterprise market, apparently unable to resist the unified communications (UC) and SIP Trunking Siren song currently mesmerizing the enterprise and SMB space. The company said it will offer enterprise organizations and their ever-more mobile workforce UC and SIP Trunking solutions, leveraging its portfolio of applications, networking and switching solutions.
The move, the company said, delivers carrier-grade IP solutions to the enterprise, and offers large organizations an end-to-end solution for secure, scalable multimedia and communications solutions.
"Unlike other offerings available in the market, Genband's proven enterprise solutions are device agnostic and offer cost-effective, innovative and evolutionary options that enable businesses to maximize both their existing and new infrastructure," said Mehmet Balos, CMO at Genband.
The Genband enterprise solutions include fully integrated VoIP, video, federated and secure instant messaging, presence, applications, desktop sharing and collaboration solutions along with native client integration into Microsoft Exchange and IBM SameTime.
Current Analysis analyst Brian Riggs said the company's move into the enterprise marketplace shows that the "expectation of anywhere, anytime on any device availability continues to drive new models in enterprise communications" as the workforce becomes increasingly more mobile and distributed.
"This move is likely to shake up the market with compelling alternatives for the large enterprise, from a developer whose company and products are well-established in the carrier infrastructure market," he said.
For more:
- see this release
- see this CRN article
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10/10/2011 - Motorola Solution's ET1 tablet a video-conferencing endpoint for enterprise?
Motorola Solutions (NYSE: MSI) today debuted its ET1 Tablet--its first Android-based tablet PC--which is its first tablet targeted at the enterprise.
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The ET1 Tablet will be Motorola's first Android-based tablet. |
The ET1 has a 7-inch color touchscreen and weighs 1.4 pounds. It can sport 32 GB of memory with a micro SDHC card. The ET1 has two USB interfaces, plus an HDMI-out slot, stereo speakers and dual microphones.
Its front and rear-facing cameras are among its features that set it up as a potential endpoint for videoconferencing. The front-facing camera includes 720p video capture; the main camera is a 8-megapixel auto-focus camera with LED flash.
Although it's currently shipping without Wi-Fi, that feature will be available later in the 4th quarter.
The company is expected to offer the tablet for less than $1,000 and is gearing up for a full rollout in 2012.
For more:
- see this CDN article
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29/08/2011 - IBM Connections comes to mobile devices
IBM (NYSE:IBM) is continuing to evolve its old Lotus Connections platform, announcing this week that it has crafted a mobile application gateway to the platform for corporate enterprise users of Apple's (Nasdaq:AAPL) iOS, Research in Motion's (Nasdaq:RIMM) BlackBerry and Google's (Nasdaq:GOOG) Android mobile devices.
The platform, now called IBM Connections, provides social networking-style access to employee status updates, wikis and other resources, so that it can be used in conjunction with unified communications tools and other collaboration applications. The new mobile apps are free from their respective device app stores.
VentureBeat says the apps take advantage of each mobile device system's unique advantages, with the Apple version enabling partial data wipes of the device to protect sensitive corporate information, the BlackBerry version allowing users to participate in online meetings and the Android version featuring click-to-call integration with the device's calendar. IBM also reportedly is working on cloud-based meeting support with LotusLive Meetings.
IBM's mobile play for Connections comes shortly after Forrester Research named Big Blue as one of the leaders in the enterprise social networking platform market, acknowledgment that might surprise observers who would expect only new names at the top of that upstart segment of the enterprise communications market.
For more:
-see this VentureBeat story on the new apps
-read this InformationWeek post on IBM Connections
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22/08/2011 - Report: Enterprise VoIP drove wireline NGN resurgence
Enterprise VoIP has played a key role in the resurgence of the wireline NGN market, a new study suggests.
Research firm Exact Ventures said the wireline voice core market grew 7 percent between the first and second quarter of this year, driven in part by the continued strength of enterprise VoIP services, including SIP trunking and hosted unified communications.
The company said the enterprise session border controller and voice application server markets each grew more than 40 percent compared to the second quarter of last year.
Exact Ventures said Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Huawei and ZTE each gained share in the worldwide IMS Core equipment market that increased more than 50 percent year-over-year in the second quarter, mainly as a result of sales to the Asia-Pacific region for the large scale wireline deployments by China Mobile and China Telecom.
"While wireline deployments currently dominate IMS Core sales, as voice-over-LTE services are introduced in the coming months and gain subscribers, the market will shift to become dominated by wireless deployments, which will drive the IMS market for well over a decade as the billions of wireless subscribers are gradually migrated to VoIP," said Greg Collins, founder and principal analyst at Exact Ventures.
Collins said older, more traditional wireline NGN segments of softswitches and media gateways, also are beginning to show stability as growth in wireline VoIP services will "also need to interface with legacy TDM services."
For more:
- see this release
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21/07/2010 - XO Communications Debuts XO Enterprise SIP Savings Estimator
XO Communications has released a new Savings Estimator tool that gives enterprises the ability to calculate an approximate cost-savings benefit of utilizing XO Enterprise SIP. According to the company, the XO Enterprise SIP enables customers to “simplify, streamline and achieve better cost savings.”19/07/2010 - Report: The economy did hurt enterprise telephony
No Jitter has done a cool round up of Frost and Sullivan findings on the world enterprise telephony market. Truly it's a plug for the full report, but the highlight reel is interesting nonetheless.
Despite all of our positive talk about the industry succeeding during the economic slump, enterprise telephony in general saw some declines. Enterprise line shipments saw a negative 20.4 percent growth rate from 2008. You might blame the decline on traditional phone service, but IP systems made up 74.2 percent of total line shipments. They declined by 21.2 percent in the base year.
So the economy did indeed snag us a little. The research firm projects a compound annual growth rate of 1.1 percent over a seven-year period IP sales beating out TDM. A bit slow, but growth is growth, right?
For more:
- read the rest of highlights here or get the report
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10/05/2010 - Video: Adding UC to the enterprise
No Jitter took some video footage at Interop and caught some five minute briefings related to VoIP and unified communications (UC). Today they've got Marty Parker of UniComm Consulting and UCStrategies giving a brief tutorial on a few approaches to adding UC to the enterprise. See the video here.
21/01/2010 - The Future of Enterprise UC in the Age of Skype
Reliability. Security. Scalability. Quality. These are the reasons why enterprise UC offerings are here to stay. A great take from a No Jitter blogger.
23/09/2009 - SPIRIT tech driving HD audio in snom phones
Snom 870 SIP phones are getting an HD audio boost from SPIRIT DSP's TeamSpirit Voice Engine Embedded, according to a TMC report. Licensing the SPIRIT technology allows snom devices to provide wideband audio even to users on overloaded networks, according to the company.
The companies said the including the SPIRIT technology in the snom 870 phones assures that enterprise communications have the highest possible quality, by providing HD call quality and cutting-edge IP telephony features. Snom launched the 870 in June in North America, after rolling it out first in Europe.
For more:
- see the TMC report here
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09/09/2009 - ShoreTel first to get Skype for SIP
ShoreTel will serve as Skype's first partner in its Skype for SIP play, which will try to take share in the SMB market. ShoreTel's 11,000 enterprise customers now can sign up for a beta version of the Skype for SIP offering, which allows incoming Skype calls to be routed over a company's PBX and allows outbound calls to be made at normal Skype rates.
Skype is hoping the cost savings from being able to make Skype calls into and out from small businesses will open a new revenue stream in this market, where it has yet to develop significant traction. Since the test program is free of any up-front charges, it is likely to see good trial numbers as small enterprises search for ways to save money during the recession. The companies did not announce what sort of incentive ShoreTel received from Skype to facilitate the arrangement, but access to Skype's more than 400 million customers certainly didn't hurt matters.
For more:
- see the GigaOm article on the announcement here
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31/08/2009 - Analyst: SIP trunking could drive SBC market
Yankee Group VoIP analyst Zeus Kerravala thinks the session border controller (SBC) market will see significant expansion as enterprises deploy SIP trunking solutions, cloud services and VoIP networks that integrate with public networks, according to a research note at No Jitter. Zerravala wrote that SBC manufacturers stand to gain the most from additional SIP deployments, as an SBC would allow the enterprise to move the network "edge" into the SIP hosting provider's cloud.
He also noted that SBCs would allow enterprise-to-enterprise communications that currently access the PSTN network to bypass it and do direct VoIP calling. SBCs can handle voice security better than traditional firewalls and other security equipment because they can handle bidirectional communications traffic, according to the report.
For more:
- see the article on No Jitter here
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18/06/2009 - NetIQ to monitor MTS Allstream UC deployments
MTS Allstream, a Canadian provider of unified communications solutions, announced it has selected NetIQ to manage its enterprise UC applications and infrastructure. With the addition of MTS Allstream's customers, NetIQ now manages more than 1 million VoIP lines worldwide, according to the company.
MTS Allstream will deploy NetIQ's AppManager for network assessment, end-to-end monitoring and reporting on MTS Allstream customer UC deployments, according to the release.
For more:
- see the joint press release here
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11/06/2009 - UC Desktop Prices Drop in Q1

Average selling prices in the UC desktop market, which has been holding steady over the past six months, dropped slightly in Q1 2009.
This weakening indicates the growing competitive nature of the industry, according to the authors of a Synergy Research Group report on the global market for collaborative applications.
26/05/2009 - IP Desktop Market Revenues to Decline Until 2011

The IP telephony endpoint market will be affected by the economic downturn - despite the fact an increasing number of enterprises are recognizing the benefits of both IP desktop phones and enterprise soft clients.
That's the conclusion of Melanie Turek, principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, which has just released its latest global study of the sector's enterprise market.
05/04/2009 - PICTURES - VoiceCon East 2009
Like all tourists who go to Orlando, FierceVoIP took pictures of the items and people we met during our travels at VoiceCon East 2009 in Orlando. We have grouped them into three categories:
Sights and Signage of VoiceCon East 2009 illustrates a few of the more interesting banners and signs we came across in Orlando. Companies spend a lot of money on banners and signs to make sure conference attendees know they are there and have a new story to tell.
Interesting IP phones at VoiceCon 2009 shows off some of the slick new media phones and telepresence devices we saw on the show floor.
People at VoiceCon 2009 has pictures of some of the IP communications executives we met with at the show.
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01/04/2009 - VoiceCon 2009: Verizon Business boosts hosted IP Centrex
ORLANDO, Fla. - Verizon Business has announced significant enhancements to its hosted IP Centrex service, including expansion of its burstable shared trunks capability, softphone support, easier E-911 provisioning, and local number provisioning.
Burstable Enterprise Shared Trunking (BEST), previously available on Verizon's IP trunking service, allows businesses to distribute inbound calls among multiple business locations, avoiding overloading when lots of calls come into one location. It also provides loadsharing of concurrent calls across the enterprise, so customers don't have to purchase more call capacity than they need for a group of locations.
Softphone support is being offered as an advanced feature under Hosted IP Centrex and includes a web management interface. In addition, a web tool allows users to register quickly and manually their physical location for E-911 purposes; other services require a more lengthy help desk service call for E-911 registration.
Another area where Verizon is coming a bit late (but still welcome) to the party is support for local number presence across North America. Businesses can now get local numbers regardless of the physical location of the office to enable a local presence. A Verizon Business spokesperson indicated that overseas locations will be available down the road.
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30/03/2009 - VOICECON: 8x8 Intros Enterprise Version of Hosted IP PBX Service

8x8 today announced the availability of an enterprise version of its hosted IP PBX phone service.
The solution is intended for deployment in larger organizations located in either a single building, a campus environment or distributed across multiple locations.
25/03/2009 - Gizmo5 CEO Challenges Skype For SIP

The CEO of Gizmo5 Michael Robertson has responded to last week's announcement of Skype for SIP by posting a comparison (see below) of the new service and his own company's OpenSky.
While welcoming Skype's initiative, he described it as a "vaporware announcement" with "murky pricing details".
24/03/2009 - VoiceCon GM talks projected attendance, hot enterprise topics
Speaking to Fierce last week, Fred Knight, general manager of VoiceCon, was cautiously optimistic that the enterprise-focused communications show would have the same number of attendees as it did last year. "We've been at it for a long time and we hope everyone who is signed up can come," said Knight. "In this economic climate, you never know."
Tracking numbers last week were on par with the same as last year, putting projected attendance in the 5,000 to 5,500 range, depending on whether or not everyone who says they are coming is coming, noted Knight. "It's consistent with last year."
Knight believes that there will be little impact upon show attendance because of the big wireless show in Las Vegas going on at the same time. "VoiceCon is focused on the enterprise," he said. "CTIA has enterprise-related stuff, but it's hardly focused at an enterprise market. I think that over the years, VoiceCon has established itself as a location that if you're in enterprise communications, it's one of the focal points; arguably it is the focal point... VoiceCon is targeted at people responsible for enterprise communications. It's been a pretty clear and singular focus."
At least 50 percent of VoiceCon attendees are IT professionals from organizations with a thousand or more employees - this show is not designed for the crowded and sometimes confusing SMB market.
What are attendees looking for when they come? There's still a lot of demand for what Knight called "Traditional IP Telephony" with people looking at how to build the right platform and to make the right architectural/design choices for an IP phone infrastructure, as well as how to leverage an IP communications once it is operational.
"Overall, we're seeing more and more interest in video." said Knight. VoiceCon will have a day-long conference-within-a-conference track focusing on choices for enterprise video and encompassing products, network issues and internal support issues.
Cloud computing also gets a look, with a specific panel to focus on the cloud from the standpoint of enterprise computing. Enterprises have a number of options, ranging from tapping into idle computing resources for an in-house cloud solution, to subscribing to a commercial cloud service on an as-needed basis when computing resources surge on a seasonal or other basis.
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11/03/2009 - Hosted VoIP goes better with UC
Frost & Sullivan says integrating unified communications (UC) applications such as chat, presence and conferencing, as well as more enmeshed apps such as CRM and ERP, into so-called communications-enabled business processes will provide the most opportunity for the hosted VoIP market.
Close to 1 million installed hosted IP telephony lines were installed at the end of 2008, says Frost's new report "North American Hosted IP Telephony Service Markets." The firm expects the number to grow to about 3.6 million lines in 2014, with small businesses attracted to hosted offerings for cost-effective voice communications. Medium and larger businesses will seek out hosted solutions so they can focus on "core business processes," as well as to get access to apps and capabilities they can test without a capex spend.
IP telephony vendors will have to develop "astute" channel strategies since most service providers are smaller, next-generation providers with limited geographic footprint and support capabilities, no established brand-name recognition, and no established customer base, says Frost.
Frost recommends that service providers expand and diversify their channels, but believes the market will still remain "extremely fragmented" due to the reluctance of incumbent carriers to grow market share at the expense of cannibalizing legacy service revenues, along with limited demand for next-gen hosted services among their existing Centrix base.
Regardless of who is selling - CLEC, SaaS/hosted providers, VARs, or system integrators - channel support will determine the success of each provider's chances.
The crystal ball also sees providers taking advantage of M&A opportunities based on complementary technologies, expertise or channels, since consolidation can help improve customer awareness and margins.
For more:
- Frost summarizes its new report.
Related articles
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11/02/2009 - From VON to the trinity/quad-play of events
Once upon a time, there was VON. It was all things to all people under the large purple umbrella. Then it went away, leaving a vacuum in its wake. So where's everyone going in 2009?
VON's two key problems were that it tried to be all things to all people and had the millstone of "VoIP = VON" so that it was primarily seen as a VoIP show rather than an IP communications show.
Back in the day, you had a lot of service providers and Tier 1 vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Cisco) going to VON because it was The Place to meet people and find out what was going on in the industry. You also had thought leaders talking about the latest trends in technology and policy. Finally, you had enterprises attending because they wanted to be in on the latest and greatest. VARs and channel types would also be there, but ITEXPO was more their cup of tea.
Service providers and Tier 1 vendors have pretty much returned to the fold of SuperComm over the past few years for carrier issues, but that's been no big secret.
For enterprise issues, they are going where the enterprise guys are - VoiceCon. I'll be down in Orlando at the end of March, and I'll be looking to see if the event has a slight bump in attendance compared to last year. If you take a look at VoiceCon's exhibitors, many of the Tier 1 exhibitors are the guys who spent beaucoup bucks at VON a couple of years ago.
Thought leadership may be taken up by eComm. There's a lot of promise in the event, but we also see some rough edges that we expect will be smoothed out over time; after all, the first VON event in the Puck Building had its moments as well.
To recap: VON gone. Replace with ITEXPO (channel partners/VARs and the people who love them), VoiceCon (Enterprise sales), SuperComm (Carriers/Service providers) and maybe eComm (thought leadership).
- Doug
09/02/2009 - Skype adding 380k users per day, targeting enterprise market
Skype is touting its growth and enterprise uptake, claiming it now adds 380,000 users per day and that one-third of registered members use the VoIP service for business purposes. The end-of-year head count of 405 million registered users used 2.6 billion SkypeOut minutes in the fourth quarter of 2008.
The company is pushing small and medium-sized enterprise adoption of Skype with the release of Skype 4.0, which took three years to develop and offers "super wideband audio." A survey of Skype for Business users found that 80 percent of users reported an increase in productivity and employee collaboration by using the product and 62 percent said Skype allowed for better communication with customers.
"There has never been a better time than now for enterprises - particularly small to medium businesses - to consider switching to Skype for their communications," Dan Neary, Skype's vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific told mis-asia.com. "In this type of environment people are looking for cost savings wherever they can find them, they are looking to ‘recession-proof' their businesses. They don't want to fly from A to B, they want to do video-conferencing."
Skype would love to continue to expand its presence in enterprise telephony, as the market could substantially increase Skype's bottom line.
For more:
- see the mis-asia.com piece here
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23/12/2008 - Snom Favors Italy Over UK For Expansion

The VoIP phone maker and developer Snom Technology is opening an office in Milan.
In what could be a barometer of the current state of Europe's economies, the German company ruled out a move to the UK.
Heike Cantzler, marketing manager for Snom Technology, said both the UK and Italy were considered for the expansion.







