Recently ShoreTel announced the acquisition of M5 networks, a New York-based hosted services carrier offering a VoIP-centric platform with early geographic strengths in New York City metro and Chicago metro area. Accounts now span the US. M5 has been noted to make recent purchases Gekotech and Callfinity with the intent of offering a broader UC-based platform which includes Unified Messaging, IM/chat, presence, and mobility.
For Starters
BIG news - Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion. Many in the IT community are laughing, even scoffing at the idea. We all know of Microsoft's less than stellar history of acquisitions in the past. This one, however, is significant and, in my opinion, a power play by Microsoft to prevent Google from further eroding the voice UC market with its Google Voice product and affiliates and adding a significant player to Microsoft's UC portfolio.
Virtualization - it's a key term used in the IP telephony and UC marketplace today. For years we've talked about voice as an application and the possibility of running voice communications in a virtualized environment. The age of software-based communications and virtualization is now here.
As user acceptance grows for new UC-enabled applications, so does the requirement for additional servers (there is however an alternative). Up until recently, the number of servers utilized for VoIP and UC were totally dependent on:
- The level of redundancy the enterprise users seek