With companies increasingly discovering the value of replacing their land-line services with IP-based telephony services, it's not too much of a surprise to hear more announcements about companies making telephony deals. One of the latest comes in an announcement from London's Gatwick Airport, reportedly the busiest single runway airport on Earth, who said late last week that they were looking to Xchanging to provide their own foray into telephony.

This said foray, according to Gatwick Airport officials, was to last at least four years, covering not only the estate for the airport, but also the O2 and BT (News - Alert) estates, providing service for its customers and the airport itself. The slated start date on the contract is October 1, 2012, but this isn't the first time that Gatwick Airport has gone with Xchanging in regard to computer services.

Gatwick Airport has actually engaged Xchanging's services, at last report, twice in the past. In 2010, Xchanging brought in Gatwick Airport's Network Managed Services system, and in 2011, handled the End User Computing Services system.

At any rate, Gatwick Airport's Chief Information Officer Michael Ibbitson had plenty of good to say about Xchanging, citing their "flexibility...to meet our needs" as well as their "drive and enthusiasm to work with us in providing a great service for our customers.”

The executive director for Xchanging, Andrew Binns, meanwhile said the company was "delighted to extend our relationship with Gatwick Airport" as it was part of Xchanging's standard business model to "build on initial successes and introduce our broad range of technology skills and services.”

Indeed, the sheer regularity of the new contracts Xchanging is winning with Gatwick Airport suggests a pattern; it’s worth wondering just what Xchanging will handle for Gatwick Airport in 2013, or if that will be the first year Xchanging doesn't bring something new to Gatwick Airport.

Still, it's clear that Gatwick Airport is satisfied with Xchanging's work, and especially in a travel-related field, bringing more services into play and providing better value is never a bad idea.

The end result here is that, hopefully, Gatwick Airport will see more business and be able to keep its single runway open for some time to come. Travel isn't an easy industry to succeed in, so hopefully the added value of Xchanging's services will ultimately prove helpful.

In related news, an esteemed player in the VoIP space, Patton (News - Alert) Electronics, has seen great success with its line of SmartNode products, which are now Microsoft Lync certified. This allows small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to implement Lync into their existing networks easily and seamlessly without experiencing incompatibility issues. Take, for example, the SmartNode 4830 Series Multi-Port Analog VoIP Gateway (News - Alert) Router, which bundles voice, data and VPN services for outstanding VoIP quality.

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