IP Phones: All

A networking joint venture formed out of a series of deals over the past several years is launching Monday in the U.S. under the name LG-Ericsson USA.

T-Mobile USA is expanding beyond its consumer roots on Monday with T-Mobile Wi-Fi Calling with MobileOffice, a service that lets businesses extend capabilities of their desk phones to BlackBerry smartphones.

Health industry software company iSoft has taken a best-of-breed approach to unified communications and videoconferencing resulting in an integrated system that has reduced costs and increased productivity.

Well before the current world financial crisis struck, organizations have sought inventive ways to engage in face-to-face meetings without the need to travel. Companies have turned to services such as Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro, Cisco WebEx, Citrix GoToMeeting, and Microsoft Live Meeting as a means for workers in multiple locations to share presentations and otherwise collaborate.

IP contact centers are proliferating, but they still pose a set of potential gotchas that businesses need to beware of as they consider upgrading from the TDM world, experts say.

Citrix has bought Vapps, a provider of high-definition voice conferencing services geared for businesses and service providers.

Avaya will let enterprise workers leave voicemail messages and combine them with e-mail, giving both callers and recipients new options for retrieving and saving their communications.

Network convergence, as in unified communications across applications and between wired and wireless modes, again is a big theme at VoiceCon in San Francisco this week.

Today's "virtual office" solutions generally require customer-premises equipment (CPE), but the rise of cloud computing-based services will allow people to be "at the office" from any location with an Internet connection, according to Cisco.

Cisco is announcing a bundle of gear and services aimed at helping companies design and install remote-site communications that replicate the connectivity workers have when they're located in corporate sites.