It's fun to see to innovators in our space team up to improve their own business processes. That's just what happened with Verizon Business and Siemens Enterprise Communications.

Siemens was looking for an integrated communications and networking solution for its European communications infrastructure--linking its Munich headquarters with operations across ten European countries. It turned to Verizon Business to provide a VoIP solution with centralized multi-country and multi-site IP Trunking.

The companies also deployed Verizon's IP Trunking's Burstable Enterprise Shared Trunks feature which will allow Siemens to to scale VoIP network capacity on demand. The feature is actually quite appropriate as the overall upgrade allows Siemens to transition all of its communications to its OpenScape Unified Communications Suite which also features the ability to add and subtract seats on-demand.

Read more about the deployment:
- in this release

Related news:
VoiceCon: Siemens announces OpenScape UC 2010
Siemens launchs SMB solution with OpenScape Office MX
Siemens brings on Chris Hummel as CMO to promote UC

This week Siemens Enterprise Communications announced OpenScape Office MX a unified communications (UC) solution aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The new offering provides features normally reserved for bigger companies, including voice, UC and critical data network capabilities in a single, easy-to-install service application.

OpenScape Office MX aims to fullfill the needs of businesses with up to 150 users. It offers usually large enterprise-only UC features like voice and conferencing services, presence, voicemail, messaging and mobility. The system is also designed to integrate with Outlook, which many SMBs use as their main productivity tool. Voice and UC features are directly accessible from an Outlook window and the system offers presence-enabled multi-channel contact center capabilities.

OpenScape Office MX is a successor to HiPath OpenOffice ME and involves a simple software upgrade for users of the previous system. The upgrade does not even require changes to the hardware platform.

For more:
- read the release

Related articles:
VoiceCon: Siemens announces OpenScape UC 2010
Polycom and Siemens announce UC partnership
Siemens goes to Amazon EC2 cloud for voice and UC apps

Unified Communications (UC) platforms were really on display at VoiceCon this week and in particular software based UC. Siemens' OpenScape UC Server 2010 is a case and point, showing itself to be hardware agnostic and have a scalable subscription model.

The software package updates Seimens' UC offerings with a cross-portfolio, standards-based open virtualization strategy and new hosting and subscription pricing options that take into account the tough economy.

Adrian Brookes, VP Office of the CTO at Siemens Enterprise Communications, explained that OpenScape might be the only offering that has elastic subscription-based licences billed "per user, per month." What does that mean? If a subscribing company uses 100 licenses in January, they pay for 100 licenses in January and when they only use 85 in February, they only pay for 85. The model will also work across versions, so companies' can roll out the new version to  a few employees at a time using the elastic subscription model as well.

OpenScape Fusion offers packaged integrations that further simplify integration of real-time communications solutions with other business applications. "The main differentiator we have is you don't have to buy any additional products like some of our competitors," said Brookes. "If you've got the capability of OpenScape, all these things are opening up... we made the decision about five years ago that we were going to move away from the hardware environment--the innovation is in the software environment and an open software environment as well."

For more:
- read the release

Related articles
Polycom and Siemens announce UC partnership
Siemens, Shared Technology team to bring OpenScape to enterprises

Kamailio - the successor to OpenSER - has been released in a new version, 3.0. This version is based on the merge between SER, SIP Express Router, and OpenSER code bases and developer teams. It’s a SIP server that you can run as a SIP proxy, a session border controller, a SIP load balancer or SIP application server. In version 3.0 you have the power of all the modules and applications in OpenSER and the raw strength of the SER core in one product. Go check it out today!

© Edvina AB, Sollentuna, Sweden 2010 VoIP-Forum. All Rights Reserved.

My friend and co-teacher Daniel-Constatin Mierla has written a series of articles on the soon-to-be released Kamailio 3.0 that highlights new features. The main thing is that this new version of the old OpenSER SIP server is merged with the original SER, as part of the SIP-router project. This gives Kamailio a large set of new features, most notably the rewritten kernel that has more stability, scalability and performance than the old OpenSER. Please visit Miconda’s blogg and learn about all the new features!

Best of New in Kamailio 3.0.0 - #1: include fileI’m starting a series of posts, to highlight the best new features in Kamailio (OpenSER) 3.0.0, of course, from my point of view, hoping to cover most of them before full 3.0.0 is out (RC3 was done yesterday).

© Edvina AB, Sollentuna, Sweden 2009 VoIP-Forum. All Rights Reserved.

Giga OM and BusinessWeek have compiled a guide to various open source VoIP applications. Read Article