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SAVE THE DATE:

2010 WINTER CONFERENCE AND EXHIBIT SHOW
JANUARY 20 - 22, 2010
Royal Sonesta Hotel - New Orleans, LA


2010 EUROPEAN CONFERENCE
JUNE 16-18, 2010
Hotel Concorde Montparnasse – Paris, France

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Avaya
Awards
IP telephony
Markets
Mitel
Nortel
Phones
snom
Unified communications

Avaya

Empirix solution now rated “Avaya Compliant”
Empirix Inc. announced that its Empirix Proactive Communications Assurance solution is compliant with key contact center solutions from Avaya. The Empirix Proactive Communications Assurance solution gives organizations the ability to test their outbound contact center from end-to-end, thus enabling companies to ensure performance, a high quality end-user experience and compliance with government regulations. The Empirix solution is now compliance-tested by Avaya for compatibility with Avaya Aura Communication Manager on Avaya S8700 servers with MCC1 Media Gateways and Avaya Proactive Contact with PG230RM. Empirix Inc. is a Platinum member of the Avaya DevConnect program—an initiative to develop, market and sell innovative third-party products that interoperate with Avaya technology and extend the value of a company’s investment in its network.
Visit www.avaya.com/devconnect or www.empirix.com.



Black Box named an Avaya Channel Partner
Black Box Corporation announced that it has become a Silver-certified Avaya Channel Partner. As such, Black Box's team of highly skilled technicians are authorized to design, install and maintain Avaya's state-of-the-art business communications systems, helping enterprises of all sizes greatly enhance their business operations with advanced unified communications, collaboration, and contact center solutions. The Silver-certified status of Black Box recognizes its capabilities in the sale, design, implementation and maintenance of Avaya systems, software and solutions. In addition, Silver-certified Channel Partners must meet rigorous service delivery and customer satisfaction criteria, develop comprehensive marketing plans and meet annual revenue commitments for the sale of Avaya solutions and services.
Visit www.blackbox.com. ^Back To Top

Awards

XCast Labs receives 2009 INTERNET TELEPHONY Excellence Award
XCast Labs announced that Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) has honored its proprietary Digital Voice & Video (DV&V) platform with the 2009 INTERNET TELEPHONY Excellence Award, presented by INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine. In addition, XCast Labs CEO Cliff Rees has accepted an invitation to speak at the ITEXPO East 2010 in Miami. “The editors of INTERNET TELEPHONY were pleased to grant XCast Labs with the INTERNET TELEPHONY Excellence Award for its achievements in advancing IP communications and for providing genuine solutions in the marketplace.  The company’s DV&V platform has proven its outstanding contribution to IP communications and delivered winning solutions for customers such as Avenue Broadband, American Cable Service and Suite Solutions,” said Erik Linask, Group Editorial Director of INTERNET TELEPHONY.
Visit www.xcastlabs.com or www.itmag.com.
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IP telephony

PIKA upgrades WARP PBX appliance platform
PIKA Technologies announced the first major upgrade to their WARP PBX appliance platform, WARP Enterprise. While the original WARP appliance was designed primarily with the needs of telephony application developers in mind, WARP Enterprise is aimed at the community of VARs, SIP providers and system integrators — organizations that would like to sell IP telephony solutions, but may not have extensive in-house development talent. While WARP Enterprise encompasses many refinements, according to the company, the principal addition is the pre-loading, optimization and integration of FreePBX, the leading configuration GUI interface for Asterisk, which greatly simplifies installation and configuration, eliminating many routine development tasks. (The Asterisk code is also pre-loaded.)  PIKA's download includes FreePBXs IVR, conferencing, find-me, backup/restore and Manager (Asterisk API) modules. Many additional modules are available at the FreePBX website.
Visit www.pikatechnologies.com. ^Back To Top

Markets

Infonetics releases report
Market research firm Infonetics Research released the second edition of its 2009 Service Provider Capex, Opex, ARPU and Subscribers report which features analysis on how current economic conditions are impacting telecom markets by region and equipment segment. Report highlights:

-Worldwide, service providers spent US$305 billion in 2008 on capital expenditure projects, such as network infrastructure upgrades.
-Global capex is forecast to decline at most 6% in 2009, mainly due to a significant capex shakeout in the Middle East and Africa, a weakening US dollar, expected declines in the Brazilian real and Mexican peso and delays in US broadband stimulus funding.
-Infonetics anticipates a year-end bump up in capex, which could bring the overall capex decline in 2009 to less than 6%.
-Optical network hardware is a bright spot in today's tightened capex environment, with decent single-digit percent spending growth expected in 2009, despite currency devaluations.
-Mainly due to currency effects, worldwide service provider revenue is forecast to decline only very slightly in 2009, to $1.67 trillion, driven by mobile communication services, as consumers continue to hold on to their mobile services during tough economic times.
-Mobile infrastructure will continue to dominate total global telecom and datacom spending, followed by voice equipment.
-The world's 10 largest service providers (ranked in order by 2008 revenue) are AT&T, NTT, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, France Télécom, Vodafone, China Mobile, Telefónica, BT, and Sprint.
Visit www.infonetics.com.
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Mitel

Mitel launches VirtualUSA SIP Productivity Suite for multi-site businesses
Mitel launched Mitel NetSolutions VirtualUSA SIP Productivity Suite, a hosted solution specifically designed for businesses with multiple locations to centralize business communications and applications. VirtualUSA SIP Suite with broadband internet access combines Mitel unified communications solutions with a hosted SIP Trunking service to provide centralized hosted communications support and management for geographically distributed offices while maintaining each locations' local presence. With the VirtualUSA SIP Suite calls from remote offices will receive localized e911 support, display local outbound caller ID, and route calls based on the local calling area. This functionality is supported and routed by Mitel Communications Director (MCD) software or the Mitel Multi-Instance Communications Director (MICD) at the host location in another market.
Visit www.mitel.com.
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Nortel

Ericsson picks up Nortel's GSM assets
Nortel announced the winning bidder for its GSM and GSM-R wireless business units -- a $103 million, all-cash joint bid from Swedish mobile vendor Ericsson and Austrian telecom Kapsch CarrierCom. GSM and GSM-R (GSM for railroads) are popular wireless technology standards that Nortel has been deploying with customers around the world. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2010. As part of the proposed deal, Kapsch will acquire the European and Taiwan GSM businesses as well as the global GSM-R business. Ericsson will acquire the North American GSM business. The move marks the latest asset sale by Nortel, which put its wireless business units on the auction block earlier this year after filing for bankruptcy protection in January. Since then, Ericsson has been leading the charge in picking up assets from the beleaguered Nortel. The company's GSM auction follows Nortel's sale of its CDMA and LTE wireless technologies to Ericsson for $1.13 billion, in a transaction that was formally completed on Nov. 13.
Visit www.nortel.com or www.ericsson.com.
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Phones

ABC showcases Grandstream IP multimedia phone
Grandstream Networks’ new GXV3140 IP Multimedia Phone for consumers was showcased in the on-set gift lounge and celebrity gift bags for the recent finale of the #1 Nielsen rated “Dancing With The Stars.” Invited stars, professional dancers, attending celebrities, judges and national/international press experienced up close how easy it is to hear and see family, friends and colleagues around the world for free using the GXV3140 and an existing broadband connection. With built-in IPVideoTalk, the phone offers face-to-face two-way or three-way video calling out-of-the-box along with instant access to Web and social multimedia applications. It has an integrated web browser giving consumers convenient, one-touch access to personalized RSS feeds of real-time online information services, thousands of Internet radio stations, social networking sites and popular streaming Internet entertainment sites like YouTube and Last.fm.
Visit www.grandstream.com.
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snom

snom dials in HD audio conferencing with Wyde Voice partnership
snom technology AG announced it has teamed with Wyde Voice LLC to deliver high-definition (HD) audio conferencing capabilities to snom's HD audio- enabled desktop VoIP phones. The partnership unlocks the ability for users of the snom 8XX series SIP phones and snom's MeetingPoint conference phone, which support snom's wideband audio, to utilize the Wyde Voice HD SoftBridge audio conferencing application. Wyde Voice HD SoftBridge is a software-based high definition audio and Web conferencing bridge technology that eliminates the need for Digital Signal Processing (DSP) cards and lets audio conferencing providers use off-the-shelf hardware to deploy software bridges that can scale from two to 10,000 concurrent user ports.
Visit www.snom.com or www.wydevoice.com.
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Unified communications

Unified communications is migrating to ‘the cloud’
Unified communications is migrating to ‘the cloud’ as vendors begin positioning it as a service rather than a product, reports In-Stat. Infrastructure providers like Cisco, Broadsoft and Microsoft are now working closely with providers of hosted VoIP services. Unified communications has yet to achieve its full potential. However, two trends are poised to enhance the richness of unified communications:

• SIP Trunking, now touted as a cost saving mechanism, will ultimately enable the interconnection of unified communications islands.

• The wireless industry’s evolution toward higher data rates is extending unified communications to smartphones and other wireless data devices. 

Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

• As the world economy rebounds, so will unified communications with total revenues (product + service) growing to $39.7 billion in 2013.

• Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel continue to trade places for the lead in the unified messaging market, although Avaya will soon have the clear lead upon completion of its Nortel acquisition.

Visit www.in-stat.com. ^Back To Top