Fonality CEO Replacement a Long Time Coming

A number of sources have picked up the news that VoIP pioneer Fonality has named a new CEO. He is David Scult, former general manager of Microsoft Office 365. The reports also typically noted that Fonality gave no reason for the departure of the former CEO. That would be Dean Mansfield, who replaced founding CEO Chris Lyman in early 2010. What most of the reports missed was that Mansfield actually left the company long ago.

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.

Cloudvox Provides Access to Ifbyphone Conferencing App, Global Infrastructure

Ifbyphone's acquisition of Cloudvox in January brought together two distinct approaches to commercial telephony platform services. Ifbyphone offered sophisticated ready-built apps that companies could access on a per-minute or per-port basis. Cloudvox offered a set of building blocks that let developers create their own apps using common open-source programming languages. Now Cloudvox has taken a significant step towards integrating the two approaches. A newly announced upgrade of its platform allows developers to write their own apps that also access some of Ifbyphone's powerful capabilities. It has also lowered and simplified pricing for the Cloudvox service.

Ifbyphone's Cloudvox Buy Highlights Questions About Platforms' Future

Ifbyphone's acquisition of Cloudvox brought together two approaches to the hosted platform services business. One involves selling access to ready-to-use applications developed by the platform provider itself. That's what Ifbyphone has done from the start. The other involves providing the basic building blocks that allow developers to create their own apps. That's what Cloudvox was invented to do. The acquisition will allow Ifbyphone to do both. The question is which approach, if either, will predominate in the future.

The Top 25 VoIP Advances of 2009

There were more advances than true innovations in the VoIP world in 2009. That's because some of the most important developments had more to do with commercial and political maneuvers than with technical creativity. Still, such maneuvers often helped spread the benefits of VoIP as much as did technical innovation. And collectively, the advances brought some already-evident trends into clearer focus. A key such trend is the increasing integration of voice with other applications and services. Another is the intensifying interest in HD voice. A third is the growing interconnection of VoIP services, in part in response to the possibilities that end-to-end HD voice offers. With such trends as background, here, in no particular order, are our top 25 VoIP advances of 2009.

Mobivox Acquisition Adds Voice Interface to SabSe's Portfolio of Services

It's clear that many VoIP companies aren't meant to be standalone telecom businesses – they function far better as providers of features and capabilities to other telecom businesses. The latest example of this is SabSe Technology's acquisition of Mobivox. Although Montreal-based Mobivox offered cheap VoIP calling services of various types, what set it apart was its so-called voice-activated user interface, or VUI. The interface let users dial by speaking rather than pressing keys – a significant benefit for mobile talkers. The addition of this capability will boost the attractiveness of the array of services SabSe is offering worldwide.