Avaya and Skype announce a strategic agreement to deliver innovative, real-time communications and collaboration solutions to businesses of all sizes. The multi-phase deal includes both go-to-market and an industry-first, joint technology integration that seeks to enable businesses to lower costs and expand how employees, customers, partners and suppliers communicate and collaborate with greater convenience and efficiency.

In the first phase of the agreement, Avaya customers in the U.S. market will have access to Skype Connect, a product which adds Skype calling to IP-based enterprise communications systems, providing a SIP communications channel between Avaya communications systems and Skype. Customers with Avaya Aura Session Manager or Avaya Aura SIP Enablement Server, CS1000, Avaya IP Office, or BCM systems can use Skype Connect to place calls globally for increased reach, while aiming to save on international calling. Enterprise-level security and features such as tracking, recording, regulatory compliance, and more are provided by the Avaya system.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of Frost & Sullivan's new report "North American VoIP Access and SIP Trunking Services Markets" to their offering.

This strategic analysis is part of Frost & Sullivans continued coverage of the conferencing and collaboration marketplace. Within this analysis, Frost & Sullivan has identified industry challenges, market drivers, restraints, competitive factors, revenues, market shares and key market trends within the North American VoIP access and SIP trunking services market. With extensive primary and secondary research, this analysis provides VoIP access and SIP trunking service providers with a detailed look at the current and changing dynamics in the fast evolving VoIP access and SIP trunking services marketplace.

Voxbone was named as a Young Bulls winner for the inaugural 2010 Bully Award honouring the leading European technology, media and telecommunications companies as presented by White Bull Summits.

A total of 60 European companies were named as finalists for the 2010 Bully Award, and 30 were honoured as winners. The deserving winners were selected from a pool of entries that included hundreds of nominated European TMT companies.

Digium announces that Kevin Fleming, director of software technologies, will deliver a keynote presentation regarding the future of open source communications software at the seventh annual AstriCon Open Source Telephony Conference and Exhibition. Each year hundreds of software developers, telephony and unified communications experts, resellers and VARs, and Asterisk enthusiasts attend AstriCon, the longest running conference devoted to the Asterisk telephony platform. Fleming’s keynote takes place on Wednesday, October 27 at 9:00 a.m. ET.

AstriCon 2010 will take place from October 26-28, 2010, at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland.

Vox Communications has released a downloadable VoIP application for use on Symbian mobile phones. Mobile subscribers can now access inexpensive Internet based calling to the US, Canada and Puerto Rico from their own country with mobile VoIP plans starting for as little as $4.95 a month. VoX offers calling plans as low as two cents a minute and unlimited plans for less than $25 a month. Subscribers are also allowed to choose a low-cost international calling plan.

According to Gartner, 80 million Symbian devices were sold worldwide in 2009, or slightly less than 47% of the entire global smartphone market. In comparison to other devices, it would take the combined sales of the iPhone, RIM, Windows Mobile and Android to give an app provider the same volume opportunity. Gartner also projects that Nokia will sell in excess of 100 million Symbian phones in each of the next 3 years. Additional information about Symbian and global smartphone sales can be found at http://www.symbian.org/yourapp.

Voxbone announces new, one-stop support of short messaging service for its direct inward dial numbers. By enabling end users with phone numbers in foreign markets to receive text messages, as well as voice calls, at local rates, the new function takes further advantage of Internet protocol networks' capacity to converge voice and data. It also replaces a multi-step, multi-contract process for Voxbone's carrier and enterprise customers.

Voxbone's support of SMS is starting with phone numbers in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Numbers in other countries within Voxbone's 50-country inventory will be added in the next few months. Using the long-haul transport mechanism of Voxbone's voice service, an SMS message texted to a DID will be routed to Voxbone, which then will deliver the message over its IP network to the end user's provider for ultimate termination, at local texting rates.

AGC of America has chosen PingTone’s Enterprise VoIP service platform to deliver service to their headquarters and satellite office locations. AGC of America had opted to leverage outsourced VoIP service in 2005, and had recently performed a market evaluation of various hosted VoIP service providers. AGC decided to select the PingTone solution as they were able to fulfill AGC’s requirements while also demonstrating the ability to provide reliable VoIP service required for AGC’s critical business operations.

After a thorough analysis of the hosted VoIP providers, and based upon PingTone’s exceptional reputation and customer service excellence, AGC of America selected PingTone. “PingTone was able to quickly and efficiently implement the PingTone service in our offices, but more importantly deliver to AGC a reliable and quality business grade VoIP service,” said Fara Francis, CIO of The AGC of America.

With the latest version of Vopium for Android, users can make free calls over Wi-Fi and mobile data networks. Vopium automatically finds the lowest call rate on your mobile phone. International calls are made using Vopium'slow-rate server, while calls to local mobile phones are cheapest using local mobile providers. Vopium also offers an instant messaging feature, allowing users to chat on Facebook and Windows Live Messenger. Vopium is currently offering 15 minutes of free calls worldwide.

Vopium has improved its Android application and is now offering free calls to other mobile phones with Vopium on either Wi-Fi or mobile data networks.

Latest global business VoIP services forecasts from ABI Research shows that the value of the overall market, which includes VoIP integrated access, SIP trunking, hosted IP-PBX/IP Centrex and managed IP-PBX services, is set to double over the next five years, to exceed $20 billion by 2015.

In 2009, the market displayed growth trends counter-cyclical to the direction the wider economy was taking, to register high growths in terms of both volume and value. The new research forecasts and market analysis are part of ABI Research’s ongoing analysis of the service provider market for business VoIP services.

For a limited time UniVoIP is giving away free phones to all organizations that sign up for a calling plan through their hosted PBX system. UniVoIP calling plans offer unlimited free inbound and intra-office calls and outbound domestic calls are only $0.02 per minute with unlimited calling plans available.

An enterprise class phone system with no hardware to buy - A hosted PBX system connects all employees to each other and to clients, no matter where they are. Main office, home offices, satellite offices, mobile workers and even international offices can all be accessible through a single phone number. With UniVoIP hosted PBX all that is needed is one phone per employee and a dedicated point-to-point connection or an Internet connection – with no equipment to purchase or manage except the phones.

The Illinois Institute of Technology announces that its Sixth annual VoIP Conference and Expo will take place October 12-14, 2010 in Chicago. This conference, where industry and academia meet, brings together technical professionals and executives from the data and telecommunications industry, standards bodies, government agencies, as well as the business community. The presentations, exhibits, social events, and session breaks provide opportunities to discover different aspects of this rapidly evolving field.

DSCI Corporation and Polycom have teamed up to promote DSCI’s iPBX Hosted Communications Service and Polycom HD Voice. iPBX is a hosted VoIP service that is deployed with Polycom SoundPoint IP and SoundStation IP phones with HD Voice. Polycom’s breakthrough HD Voice technology provides twice the call clarity when compared to ordinary calls.

DSCI selected a corporate underwriting opportunity on WBUR, Boston’s affiliate of National Public Radio, as the vehicle for the promotion. A series of 10-second spots introduce DSCI and Polycom’s HD Voice to listeners.

Paltalk announces that users will be able to make unlimited international phone calls through Vumber, Paltalk's virtual phone number service. Users will be able to call 39 countries for a flat rate of $29.95 per month.

Vumber's flat rate is the first in a series of mobile-VoIP solutions planned for release by Paltalk over the next quarter in a market that is primed for massive growth. According to a Frost & Sullivan report that was issued in May of this year, the next five years will see a huge spike in the demand for mobile VoIP services -- from $605.8 million in 2008 to $29.57 billion worldwide by 2015.

Avaya Government Solutions has completed the first end-to-end, VoIP calls across the Global Information Grid as a part of the Defense Information Systems Agency's field evaluation of its Real Time Services Unified Communication program. The calls were completed using a new technology essential to meet the heightened requirements for assured service and security for the U.S. Department of Defense.

The demonstrated technology is a critical operational capability included in DISA's Multi-Function SoftSwitch upgrade to the DoD's Defense Switch Network. As one of several vendors participating in the MFSS Spiral 1 rollout, Avaya Government Solutions teamed with Acme Packet to supply the secure VoIP communications infrastructure and General Dynamics Information Technology served as the system integrator.

Vocalocity has launched another feature that helps its cloud based phone system work even harder for its customers. Click-To-Dial is an additional capability that Vocalocity is providing free to all its customers.

With Click-To-Dial, customers can now make phone calls with the click of a mouse. After downloading the Click-To-Dial application to a PC, users can click on telephone numbers on any web page or they can utilize their Microsoft Outlook Business Contact add-on to place calls. When a number has been clicked, the customer’s desktop phone rings. After the desktop phone is answered the “clicked number” is dialed immediately, establishing a connection. Click-To-Dial also works well with browser-based CRM applications, like Salesforce.com, and Bullhorn.