The Top 10 VoIP & Video Conferencing Developments of 2011

Video conferencing was a lot more interesting to watch in 2011 than was VoIP. It wasn't that nothing happened in VoIP during the year. It was just that a lot more happened in video conferencing. This was especially true in the SMB space. Early summer saw a slew of significant announcements from vendors and providers. These announcements figured prominently in the VoIP Evolution report "SMB Video Conferencing: Getting Beyond Clouds & Interoperability."

Cisco's Cloud TelePresence Move Complicates SMB Video Conferencing Choices

Cisco's recently introduced cloud TelePresence offering considerably complicates life for small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) shopping for video conferencing solutions. On one hand, it adds an impressive new option to the list of available products. On the other, it increases the number of questions companies must answer before making their purchasing decisions. In short, while the introduction broadens the range of choices for SMBs looking to use video conferencing on a regular basis, it also makes their decision-making process more difficult.

Fonality Becomes a Cloud Communications Company

One of the key characteristics of the VoIP business is competition between dissimilar companies with vastly different business models and logic. A leading example, though far from the only one, is the competition between premises IP PBX vendors and hosted VoIP providers. Their products are very different – one is hardware, one is a service. But they are trying to sell them to the exact same customers: SMBs (small to medium-size businesses) looking for advanced telephony features. Open-source IP PBX maker Fonality from the start focused on the vendor approach, but its unique hybrid hosted architecture also put it partly in the services camp. Now, in a remarkable transformation, it has become solely a cloud communications provider, though with a crucial hardware component.