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The downfall of North America’s largest telecom equipment vendor, Nortel Networks Corp., accelerated this week when, days after selling off parts of its application delivery portfolio, the Toronto-based company announced that it’s laying off 3,200 workers.

 

TMC Group Managing Editor Erik Linask, an industry veteran with a keen sense of the market, posed a series of provocative questions on Monday, when he asked: What of its existing Nortel (News - Alert) enterprise customers? What of those businesses looking to make the move to VoIP without sacrificing their current investments? 

 

“Many vendors have already launched buy-back programs for Nortel customers,” Linask wrote. “That’s not a bad approach for companies with extra cash on hand for a new phone system, or those whose existing systems are aged and due for replacement anyway.”

 

For Linask, it’s safe to say the former doesn’t represent a very large segment of the enterprise population, especially in the current economic climate. For the latter group, he said, choices abound, from on-premises solutions to hosted to hybrid alternatives. 

 

“To address this need among the existing Nortel install base not yet ready to replace their legacy systems, yet looking to move to the VoIP generation, Nectar (News - Alert) Services has taken a different approach – what it calls an ‘anti-buyback program,’ ” Linask writes. “The idea is to allow existing Nortel users to leverage their investments into the foreseeable future by using the Nectar Enterprise Session Management System.”

 

Which brings us to IP-PBX (News - Alert) systems, private branch exchange systems within an enterprise that switch calls between VoIP users on local lines while allowing all users to share a certain number of external phone lines.

 

Mid-week we learned that officials with a company that licenses source code for technologies – including IP telephony and session initiation protocol, or “SIP” – are hailing their new gateway as a convenient, cost-effective way to connect VoIP calls to the public switched telephone network in most countries.

 

According to TeleSoft International Inc. – an international company with U.S. headquarters in Austin, Texas – the so-called “TsCONNECT PSTN Connectivity Gateway (News - Alert)” helps convert VoIP signaling to PSTN signaling, bringing IP telephony calls to millions of existing PSTN-based telephones, switches and PBXs.

 

Essentially, that allows businesses of any size – through IP-PBXs – to take advantage of increasingly widespread broadband so that they can offer low-cost VoIP-based calling plans, TeleSoft officials say.

 

“Because the TsCONNECT Gateway API consists of industry standard IETF SIP messages, there is no need to change existing IP-PBX software to interface to a proprietary PSTN card API, avoiding extra cost, delay and risk,” company officials say. “TsCONNECT works with standard off the shelf telephony cards and is not tied to any specific brand of card.”

 

As TMCnet reported this month from VoIP’s premier event, the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo, one expert said that SIP trunking is really coming off as a market phenomenon.

 

According to Anders Eriksson, chief executive officer of Stockholm-based Ingate Systems, a company that develops firewall technology and products that enable SIP communications for the enterprise while maintaining control and security at the network edge, the SIP trunking market now is telling us that it’s taking off and that it’s becoming a standard technology.

 

Generally speaking, SIP trunking is a service offered by Internet telephony service providers so that businesses can adopt VoIP using their Internet connection. That way, they can communicate with others who rely on the PSTN, since the enterprise IP-PBX is connected to the service provider’s PSTN gateways over the Internet.

 

“All service providers are moving into SIP trunking full-speed,” Eriksson told TMCnet. “Not only the ITSPs but also the big incumbents and cable companies. They’re sending representatives here (to ITEXPO (News - Alert)) to see what’s going on in the market.”

 

Officials at TeleSoft say that TsCONNECT runs alongside IP-PBX software on the same PC/server platform and under the same Linux operating system.

 

“TsCONNECT is easy to install with a standards-based SIP API that interfaces directly to the IP-PBX SIP without requiring any hardware connections,” company officials say. “No Ethernet ports or NICs are used or required.”

 

Finally, TMCnet reported just yesterday that, eyeing a market that analysts say will weather this recession and could generate $8 billion in revenue worldwide by 2013, a German VoIP phone manufacturer today announced that its SIP-based device portfolio integrates with an IP-PBX system developer’s flagship product.

 

Officials at Berlin-based snom Technology AG say their so-called “3xx“ series VoIP phones – including the “snom 370,” pictured below right – are interoperable and deployable with the IP-PBX system “IPcts“ from AYC Telecom, which operates out of Mullingar, just west of Dublin in Ireland.

 

According to Michael Knieling, executive vice president of marketing and sales for snom, AYC Telecom has generated momentum in Europe and the United State as SMBs recognize the advantages and value of VoIP features within its IP-PBX IPcts System.

 

“We are pleased to achieving full certification and integration with AYC Telecom and serve as their endpoint provider,” Knieling said. “Our partnership is another proof point of snom’s continued momentum in teaming up with industry’s premier, best-of-breed technology partners.”

 

Specifically, snom officials say, their 3xx series are business-class, open, standards-based SIP VoIP phones that feature global executive design and styling with a large high- resolution display screen, programmable function keys and business calling features. The SIP devices offer the comprehensive VoIP security – including support for TLS and SRTP protocols and VPN capabilities – and can support several audio devices simultaneously, such as the handset, headset, hands- free and POE.

 

As TMCnet reported, Scottsdale, Arizona-based hi-tech market research firm In-Stat predicts that business media phones will generate about $3.3 billion in annual revenue by that time, and that the U.S. market will open up this year, with Europe coming online in 2010.

 

“The media phone represents a new category of broadband multimedia device that has the potential to become the fourth screen in the home, complementing the PC, TV and mobile handset,” the firm says in its 51-page report, “The Media Phone Has Arrived.”