Five9 announces that VoIP provider Vonage deployed its Virtual Call Center offering in several divisions to manage marketing campaigns. With a history of subscriber growth and nearly 2.6 million lines in service, Vonage continually evaluates and employs new tools for customer retention and satisfaction initiatives. Five9’s predictive dialing and outbound solutions were deployed quickly and flexibly to align with the telecommunications provider‘s aggressive goals for customer outreach.

Keynote announces the results of its Industry Study Series of Voice Service Providers. The study looked at reliability and performance of leading VoIP, PacketCable and local wireline services.

Keynote’s competitive research study provides valuable data and insight that help VoIP providers of both managed networks and unmanaged networks overcome the quality barriers separating them from traditional local wireline phone service. The study compares the relative performance over a single month of a local wireline service (AT&T) with seven broadband VoIP providers (AT&T CallVantage, EarthLink trueVoice, Lingo, Packet8, Verizon VoiceWing, Vonage, and Vonics Digital) and two cable voice service providers (Time Warner Digital Phone and Comcast Digital Voice) from calls made from residential locations in New York and San Francisco.

snom announces the first open, standards-based native Office Communication SIP telephone. The snom OCS edition will be introduced to the public for the first time at CeBIT Australia, booth C58, Sydney, 20-22 May 2008. With the snom OCS edition, users can integrate any of snom’s 3xx series VoIP phones with Microsoft Office Communication Server providing them with advanced communications features of Microsoft OCS. To call someone, the user simply has to click on the active directory and the computer can place the call. Furthermore, users can search for their contacts and view their status and send files directly out of OCS. Thus, snom OCS edition is the first VoIP phone to provide professional business communication features like VPN through open standards.

Toshiba Telecommunication Systems Division announce the availability of its newly enhanced Net Phone 6.0, delivering powerful new presence capabilities for call center and general office use. Now available, Net Phone 6.0 has been designed for use with the Toshiba Strata CIX family of IP business communication systems as well as all Toshiba IP, digital and soft phone telephones.

Among the powerful features of Net Phone 6.0 are:

Presence Viewer

• Integrated window shows real-time status of the users including phone status (idle, busy, or do not disturb), user status (such as "in meeting"), and chat availability status.
• Click to initiate call or request chat with agents
• Collaboration tools including Chat and/or Whiteboard, easily implemented from the Presence window
• Auto dial capabilities from the Presence window

The SIP Forum proudly announces it has experienced a dramatic surge in membership since the beginning of 2008, with both dues-paying, corporate Full Membership and individual, “Participant” membership experiencing a 100% growth rate compared to the last quarter of 2007. Currently, the SIP Forum has 46 Full Member companies and more than 5,000 individual members from around the world.

According to Marc Robins, SIP Forum Managing Director and President of SIP Forum, “The recent surge in our membership ranks is a clear signal that the work of the Forum is resonating with equipment vendors, service providers and developers of SIP-based IP communications products and services. Indeed, one of the reasons for our recent growth is the expanding support and momentum behind the SIP Forum's SIP trunking initiative called SIPconnect, which provides an industry-approved set of rules and guidelines for accomplishing trouble-free, direct IP peering between SIP-enabled IP-PBXs and SIP-enabled VoIP service providers.”

RedVoiss has leveraged Acme Packet’s NextSBC Reassurance Program to deploy Acme Packet Net-Net session border controllers in its VoIP network at both subscriber access and network interconnect borders. Acme Packet’s NextSBC Reassurance Program is designed to ease both the technical and business obstacles of migrating users of other SBCs to Acme Packet's industry-leading solutions.

RedVoiss has deployed Acme Packet Net-Net SBCs in its VoIP network to cultivate continued growth of its residential and business subscriber base throughout Chile, as well as for VoIP interconnects with national and international service providers. Acme Packet SBCs extend interoperability with RedVoiss’ service provider peering partners’ networks and help expedite time to market. RedVoiss will also take advantage of the Acme Packet Connected Universe program to facilitate peering and interconnect relationships with other Acme Packet service providers for PSTN termination.

Packet8 announces the addition of "call queuing" functionality to the Packet8 Virtual Office small business phone service, now in use by over 11,000 U.S. companies.

With the Packet8 Virtual Office Call Queuing feature, a business can accept a greater number of incoming calls throughout the day by placing callers in a queue, rather than sending them to voicemail, when sales agents or employees are occupied with other customers. Virtual Office Call Queuing is an ideal feature for the small business that receives incoming calls into functional areas such as sales, technical support, customer service, billing and much more.

iSkoot has been selected for the UIQ Alliance partner program. iSkoot brings to the UIQ community an innovative, carrier-friendly mobile-to-VoIP service that empowers users to call or chat with contacts and colleagues across the globe anytime on their mobile handsets. UIQ Technology, owned by Sony Ericsson and Motorola, provides a customizable user interface and development platform that is pre-integrated with Symbian OS, the leading industry standard operating system for smartphones. As a member of UIQ's invitation-only partner program, iSkoot strengthens its relationships with the major players in the UIQ community and gains unique access to advanced technical support and joint marketing ventures with UIQ Technology.

360networks has expanded its VoIP coverage into California. This expansion will add 238 new rate centers serving Los Angeles, San Diego and the surrounding areas. With these new rate centers, 360networks can now provide its full suite of VoIP services in 1,172 rate centers covering more than 54 million people.

360networks' VoIP360 solutions provide maximum reach, reliability and quality of service. It is 100% IP-based and runs on the company's wholly owned 17,200-mile, fiber-optic backbone. Customers can access 360networks' platform with a single IP connection and feature server. For maximum flexibility, 360networks offers customers an a la carte menu of services such as dedicated IP connectivity, DIDs, CNAM, 911, origination and termination services.

HelloSoft announces its VoIP technology is ready for Passive Optical Network. The PON, which can carry all three types of traffic natively in packet form over a single fiber connection from the central office to the customer premises, is a perfect platform for launching packet-based VoIP service. VoPON is based on the universal standards-based SIP signaling protocol. It is the only protocol that can scale for multimedia services and future integration with IMS wireless networks. Carriers that deploy HelloSoft VoIP therefore gain a range of options for leveraging their investment and generating new revenue streams. HelloSoft is keeping up the pace by launching its VoIP for PON initiative.

Pantel and IPextreme jointly announce the establishment of a strategic development initiative addressing the problem of automatic location of 911 emergency calls within an Internet protocol telephone network built on a ColdFire microprocessor platform. This initiative will enable emergency calls placed using VOIP telephone services to be properly located based on the geographic location of the call.

Currently, emergency calls placed using VOIP services are not automatically dispatched to the physical location of the call, but rather to the address listed on the caller’s account. The ELI is an innovative IP appliance that will enable the dispatch center to immediately identify the physical location of the call correctly, thus ensuring that first responders are directed to the proper location.

Research and Markets announces the addition of "SIP Enabled Servers and IP PBX Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, 2008 to 2014" to their offering.

SIP based IP PBX markets are poised for significant growth as people move to purchase IP based servers for communications. Significant pent up demand will be converted to sales as systems are put on the market that permit implementation of voice over IP that works. Voice over IP systems purchases have been postponed for ten years or more, waiting for technology that works. VoIP technology finally works.

AltiGen Communications has entered into a master distribution agreement with Boport Tele-Communication BV, a leading distributor of communications products and services in the Benelux countries -- Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.

Boport will offer AltiGen's complete line of VoIP business phone systems, including branch office, enterprise and call center solutions, to its own reseller channel via sub-distributors for telecommunications and IT. In addition, Boport will offer its channel partners specialized sales, marketing and technical training in order to quickly ramp-up and support new AltiGen resellers.

An industry summit in London will provide a unique forum to discuss some of the critical issues facing media companies and network operators as a result of new online and mobile broadband services.

The focus of the second annual Broadband Connect Summit is "Enabling fixed and wireless networks for broadband media services". The conference will include senior speakers and representatives from global brands including BT, BBC Worldwide, Virgin Media, Alcatel-Lucent, Admob and Disney.

Existing online and mobile network infrastructure is being stretched by the increasing demand for rich media services. Next generation networks promise to bring new entertainment services to the home and the handset but will require significant investment by operators.

Edgewater Networks announce that its EdgeMarc VoIP VPN Network Services Gateways are compliant with key Internet protocol telephony solutions from Avaya. The EdgeMarc VoIP VPN Network Services Gateway successfully completed compliance testing with Avaya Communication Manager release 4.0 and Avaya IP Office release 4.1.9.

The EdgeMarc VoIP VPN solution helps businesses simplify office connectivity, enable secure, high-quality voice and reduce problem resolution times through remote monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities. The VoIP VPN appliance includes an all-in-one access gateway with T1 CSU/DSU or Ethernet WAN, IPSec VPNs, stateful packet inspection firewall, VoIP prioritization, traffic shaping, passive call quality monitoring and managed Ethernet switch.