Monday Highlights: Sipera, Samsung, Aspect

I’m down in Orlando this week at VoiceCon, and I’ve already had some interesting meetings with several companies.

 

Sipera Systems made a couple of announcements. I spoke with director of marketing Brendan Ziolo, who told me that the company released the latest in their IPCS family, the IPCS 210. Key takeways include the fact that this product fills a need at the lower end of the scale, as it is designed to serve up to 200 users. Previous IPCS offerings were designed for 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000 users. While designed to serve a smaller constituency, the IPCS 210 still carries with it the software DNA of its larger siblings, offering much of the same functionality, such as VoIP firewall/Session Border Control; VoIP Intrusion Prevention; VoIP Anti-Spam; and a Unified Communications policy manager. The only feature not included is the VPN capability of the larger IPCS devices, but Sipera told me that they’re working on solving that riddle as well.

 

Sipera also announced a deal with AGN, an Internet Telephony Service Provider, to offer secure SIP trunking for AGN’s IP telephony deployments. Essentially AGN will incorporate the Sipera security solution into its OnDemand SIP offering, which will use Secure RTP (real-time protocol) and TLS (transport layer security) in combination with SIP truking to offer end users a secure communications service.

 

 

I also met with Samsung Business Communications’ director of marketing and business development  Ann Irwin, who was excited to share with me some details on the latest Samsung product offering, the OfficeServ 7100. The product is set to be unveiled at an upcoming Graybar technology summit this April 19 (which should tell you something about the distribution plans), but Ann shared some of the details with me yesterday. The 7100 is targeted at SMBs and essentially completes the OfficeServ product line, which now offers a solution to fit the needs of most enterprises.

 

This particular offering is a 4-line, 8-station setup that comes with 6 IP phones — preprogrammed — and is expected to list at about $1,800. Voicemail is included as is the data capability that comes with the larger systems.

 

I’ll have more on the OfficeServ 7100 later.

 

Finally, I met with representatives from Aspect Software who shared with me their announcement of a deal with Microsoft to deliver a solution geared towards small and midsize contact centers. The initiative will essentially couple Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server as an embedded component of the Aspect Unified IP product.

 

Expected availability of the solution is set for July 2007.

 

Today it’s back into the fray with a whole raft of meetings and hopefully new product announcements.