Nuvoiz readies softphone for enterprise

By Vivek | January 31st, 2007 at 02:59 pm ET         

Bringing softphone based VoIP to corporates has never really gotten off the ground due to the obvious lack of a standards-based application that gives IT teams ease of management. Unofficially Skype gets the most traffic mainly from SMBs while larger companies are looking for block out Skype for obvious lack of management controls. Mountain View, CA based Nuvoiz(simply put — New Voice) will be looking to fill this important gap in the enterprise VoIP when it launches its comprehensive Enterprise Softphone System at DEMO. With $3 million in funding from Yozan Inc. of Japan, and more than a year under development, Nuvoiz does sound prepared for the target market.

Features IT departments will love – Integration with PBX systems, SIP and XMPP compliance making it easier to integration with other services, NAT and firewall traversal with Nuvoiz VoIP Network Controller, tools for management at the back-end, and integration with company LDAP. Nuvoiz is planning ahead times in terms of platforms it will support. Initial planned support include softphone for Windows XP/2K as well as Windows Mobile 5.0 and 2003 with development for Symbian client underway. From mobile standpoint, Nuvoiz is targeting dual mode handsets which will enable wider coverage of service. Nuvoiz has also developed a smart way in which it will work with regular telecom infrastructure. Companies can enable Nuvoiz to use the office phone extensions on the softphone located on either the PC or on mobile. So any call people receive, they will be able to access it from any of the 3 locations – phone, PC, mobile. Alternatively the softphone can be assigned a separate phone extension and can be configured to ring in case the call on the regular phone goes unanswered. And in case a user with Windows Mobile based phone is out of office, but has access to WiFi, he/she can still make calls to his/her colleagues on their office network due to the superior Nuvoiz NAT and firewall traversal technology.

According to Jim Koh, CEO Nuvoiz, they have already signed up 6 corporate customers for the service in US and Japan. Nuvoiz also has some other interesting products they are working on like the Fast Access Point Handover for Mobile VoIP over Wi-Fi. Should be an interesting company to watch out for when all Skype is doing is making noise about enterprise VoIP without any concrete solution at hand.

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