It was back to the keynote room for the second set of keynotes from Speech-World Conference.

First up was Inter-Tel’s Jeff Ford, that firm’s CTO and President, talking about speech technology and what enterprises might hope to gain from it. Ford echoed a point made in the morning’s keynotes, namely that we are at a critical juncture, an inflexion point in the growth of this industry.

The core technology is getting to the point where speech is becoming more reliable.

Speech technology is starting to become mainstream, and it’s changing the way businesses communicate internally and externally,” said Ford.

Historically the technology has enjoyed a poor reputation. IVRs are mocked in commercials on TV (por Espanol, aprimo numero dos…) with customers emulating DTMF tones in person (“boop…beep…boop”).

Ford continued by underscoring a number of current trends in the enterprise, including:  increased mobility (with concomitant rise in new device proliferation); distributed organizations (multiple smaller locations, increased work at home); continued emphasis on productivity enhancement and expense reduction.

Enterprises require a number of things, he said. New technology alone is not enough.

Popular Telephony made news today when they announced the commercial release of a peer-to-peer serverless communication system for SoHo customers. The solution blends the PeerioBiz soft phone and Peerio Gateway with the Skype network.

The announcement is significant for SoHo/SMBs, in that this solution essentially eliminates the need for a PBX.

Users employ the PeerioBiz softphone client, which is based on Popular Telephony’s Peerio serverless middleware. When installed across the workplace, PeerioBiz forms a telephony system ‘sans PBX’ while supporting a range of standard PBX features.

The Peerio Gateway for Skype enables customers to originate and terminate calls with Skype In/Out service or to interconnect directly with Skype users on a true peer-to-peer basis.

According to Gavin McFadyen, Director Product Management at Popular Telephony, “We worked with small business customers to identify the functionality that will be easy to use and which enables them to combine the inexpensive calling benefit of Skype with vital feature functionality of Peerio. This includes such enterprise and Centrex like features as call transfer, conferencing, call park, and others that our research showed the customers were demanding from a next generation phone system provider.”

PeerioBiz Small Business system supports more then 30 enterprise grade features usually found in standard PBX.

Nortel and IBM have joined forced in a strategic development agreement, which among other things, menas that the two companies will create a Joint Development Center in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park.

The two companies will collaborate on a variety of research projects including work on a new class of blade servers bringing IBM’s Server Technology and Nortel’s carrier-grade communications expertise together.

The complete release is below.

Nortel, IBM Sign Strategic Development Agreement to Establish Joint Development Center

Initial Focus on Business Transformation, Focused Research, and Collaborative Innovation

Armonk, NY & Toronto – – Nortel* [NYSE/TSX:NT] and IBM [NYSE: IBM] today announced the signing of an agreement designed to support customized products across a range of market segments.

As the first step in this technology, research and services relationship, the companies have established a Nortel-IBM Joint Development Center in Research Triangle Park, NC to collaborate on the design and development of new products and services.

“This agreement with IBM is a critical component of our strategy to partner for growth,” said Bill Owens, Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Nortel. “Working with IBM, as one of their key partners, is a bold step forward in our efforts to transform our business by reaching an entirely new level of R&D collaboration while reducing our R&D costs, introducing products at a faster pace and serving a broad range of customers more rapidly.”

At the Nortel-IBM Joint Development Center, personnel from both companies will:

work together to enhance and extend current products, drawing from various divisions within Nortel and IBM, to drive new revenue growth while reducing R&D costscollaborate on focused research on a project-by-project basis, enabling a new level of product creation by tapping the deep skills of each firm to introduce solutions more rapidlywork together on technology, initially, a new class of blade servers – bringing together IBM’s Server Technology and Nortel’s carrier-grade communications expertise – that would meet the specific and demanding data flow, reliability and security needs required by the network equipment marketplace embracing next generation network solutions.

Nortel expects to utilize IBM engineering and technical services, for a number of projects, all aimed at broadening Nortel end-to-end broadband, Voice over IP, multimedia services and applications and wireless broadband offerings.

“Nortel is a company with a strong history of innovation. Together, we are working to reduce complexity and cost of service delivery while enabling innovation for a new set of on-demand services.

Here's the first of many responses I expect today regarding the FCC decision.

This from Covad -- the complete release is below.

COVAD Applauds FCC Decision to Require All VoIP Providers to Implement ''Enhanced 911'' Service

Covad Already Builds E-911 Service into All of Its Managed VoIP Phone Lines

SAN JOSE, Calif.-- May 19, 2005--Covad Communications Group, Inc. (OTCBB:COVD), a leading nationwide provider of integrated voice and data communications, today applauded the Federal Communications Commission's ruling that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers must include enhanced 911 service to their customers. The unanimous decision came at this morning's open FCC meeting.

E-911 service pinpoints a distressed caller's location so emergency services can respond immediately.

Just saw this on the wire...  Ever the sign of a healthy industry, the acquisitions in the VoIP space continue at a torrid pace in 2005.

Here's the official release:

VoIP Inc. announced today that it has advanced $475,000 dollars and had signed a letter of intent to acquire Caerus, Inc. which includes all wholly-owned subsidiaries; Volo Communications, Inc., Caerus Networks Inc, and Caerus Billing Inc.

Under the purposed purchase terms, VoIP, Inc. will acquire 100% of the stock and assets of Caerus, Inc in exchange for the issuance of 15 million common shares of VoIP, Inc.

According to an item from In-Stat:

"The international telecommunications industry is in the early stages of a migration to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), reports In-Stat. The big question is when will a mass migration to VoIP occur? 2005-2009 is the consumer and small business VoIP ramp-up period, and migration to VoIP will peak in the 2010-2014 time frame, the high tech market research firm says. This time frame is largely dependent on carriers' strategies for migration to the Next-Generation Network (NGN)."

I generally tend to agree that increasing amounts of residential users, small businesses, and large enterprises will become consumers of VoIP services. Noone really knows how long this will take, but I find no fault with In-Stat's assertion that we'll see a ramp-up to 2009, and even higher numbers in 2010-2014.