South Australia Water Corporation is a water utility wholly owned by the South Australian state government, providing fresh water and waste water services to South Australia's nearly 1.5 million citizens.

Founded in 1856, it's been around for a while.

As with many public utilities, call volumes can be wildly unpredictable with call types ranging from service requests and billing enquiries to emergencies, such as water main failures and sewer blockages.

SA Water sought to answer all calls to its customer service center within 20 seconds, and given the wide variety of calls it receives, "decided to seek a more systematic way to forecast call volumes and, more importantly, schedule staff to ensure it achieved its service level commitments," company officials said.

A recently-announced program from Phone.com is designed to enlist independent sales agents and value-added resellers to sell or deploy alternatives to premise-based telephone systems.

Phone.com provides Voice over Internet services for small businesses. Company officials say the recently-announced Channel Partner Program is "designed with today's professional sales agents and value-added resellers in mind," offering fees as well as a recurring percentage from sales.

Ari Rabban, Phone.com CEO, observed that while independent sales agents provide an important service to business customers throughout the United States, Phone.com "recognizes that there have been few products for IP telephony available for agents to sell to customers with lower-end requirements of two to forty phone lines."

He explained that this program has been created to address that need, and to "contribute to their successes."

Recently Sorenson has issued a Media Solutions Overview, helpful for those who want to organize, plan, and conduct an evaluation of Sorenson Media Solutions.

Since its inception in 1995, Sorenson Media has worked in Internet video to mainstream applications, "improving the online video experience for both content creators and consumers," company officials say.

The document provides an overview of each of Sorenson Media's offerings, the architecture behind those technologies, and detailed company information. The paper answers the critical, basic questions you need answered.

It's primarily for readers who are evaluating Sorenson Media as a technology platform, and for business decision makers who "must address strategic and functional issues as they plan their online video initiatives," as Sorensen officials explain.

A majority of VoIP companies, according to officials with Speedflow Communications, "face the necessity to differentiate destination priority among vendors."

As an example, company officials highlight a case when customers are interested in certain termination points with high voice quality:

"Advanced algorithm of dynamic routing is implemented in Mediacore system to tackle this task. In addition to the existent routing scheme of termination and origination points, the Access Level feature has been implemented to allow deterministic routing."

The Access Level feature, "offers more flexible and selective routing management and efficient control," over the possibility of calls for some groups of customers or vendors and destinations," officials explain.

Nextiva Office has launched a new micro-site for their IP-based fax service and is rebranding its flagship product.

"Company executives say the newly christened offering will have a more familiar ring to potential customers," according to industry observer Adam Stone, who notes that the new offering, Nextiva Office, "bundles together Nextiva vFax with the company's virtual PBX, in a service that includes such tools as voicemail-to-e-mail, auto-attendant, advanced call routing, and on-hold music."

Last month, TMC's Susan J. Campbell reported that Nextiva announced a complimentary voice greeting to business subscribers of the Nextiva Office and Connect Virtual PBX services.

"A Virtual PBX solution can deliver a number of benefits to the small business as those who subscribe are able to project a more professional image without the need or expense of an on-premise phone system or technician, Campbell wrote. "This helps to create a better perception among customers, keep costs low and enhance communications capabilities."

Read more here.