JAJAH Launches SIP Trunking With Microsoft OCS Deal

SIP trunking brings a number of benefits to small and medium-sized businesses. Incoming and outgoing calls travel over the company's Internet connection to and from the provider's facilities. That means there is no need to buy separate voice and data lines from phone companies. Calls between the company's different branches or sites are typically free. And long-distance and overseas calls are usually quite cheap, since they're traveling over the provider's backbone IP network.

It also saves on equipment costs. Because SIP trunks connect directly to the company's IP PBX, there's no need for extra hardware such as analog line interface cards. And JAJAH has now just launched its new SIP trunking service with another built-in saving: It requires no IP PBX hardware at all. Instead, the company can use Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 Release 2, which is IP PBX software they can run on their existing Office servers.

The new offering adds yet another service built on JAJAH's global VoIP infrastructure. The company started as a straightforward provider of Web-activated VoIP. Users could initiate inexpensive through a Web or mobile Web interface, or by dialing an assigned local number that would ring the overseas number to which it was registered. JAJAH would set up local calls at both the initiating and receiving locations, and connect the two calls via its IP network. It also offered click-to-call buttons users could embed in their own Websites or e-mail, to allow people to call them via that same infrastructure.

Soon JAJAH was providing the transport for Yahoo's Web calling service. It also began offering hosted IP PBX service for SMBs. And it even provided, in partnership with IBM, automated voice translation for mobile users. That service went live in China just in time for the Beijing Olympics. It launched its Concierge feature, which let mobile users make calls via voice commands, at the same time.

Its latest announcement indicates an increasing emphasis on business customers. Its business accounts let companies pay for multiple users from the same account credit pool. Administrators can manage all users from the same interface, including adding and removing them and giving them individual calling credit levels. Administrators also receive monthly usage reports.