Agito has announced support for VoIP over Wi-Fi and Unified Communications on Research In Motion (RIM) BlackBerry handsets. Agito Networks' newest enterprise mobility solution also delivers Wi-Fi/cellular network handover to the BlackBerry.

Prior to this announcement, Agito already worked with more than 40 mobile handsets that use Symbian OS and Windows Mobile OS. The company's new support for the RIM smartphones makes it the first vendor to extend VoIP, UC and PBX functionality to the BlackBerry over both a wireless LAN (WLAN) and cellular network. Before Agito's support, BlackBerry users could only access UC and PBX over the cellular network.

Agito's RoamAnywhere Mobility Router combines mid-call features for BlackBerry smartphones including "hold, conferencing, transfer; a single enterprise number and voicemail; directory query; and call retrieve – with automatic sub-100 millisecond handover over both Wi-Fi and cellular networks," according to the company's statement. RoamAnywhere's handover between Wi-Fi and cellular networks can reduce mobile costs and improve in-building coverage.

In his prepared remarks, Pejman Roshan, Agito Networks chief marketing officer, said "the industry has been asking mobile UC vendors to deliver support for BlackBerry smartphones for years. Clearly we are pleased to meet these requirements, after significant investment and effort over these past two years."

RoamAnywhere pricing remains unchanged at about $9,995 for the 2000 Series and $27,495 for the 4000 Series. The new RIM BlackBerry support will be available early next month with sales support from Agito's worldwide channel partners.

Our observation: As a five-year BlackBerry user, Larry is especially happy to see more mobile UC support for his smartphone. And apparently he is not alone as a BlackBerry user for business: according to Gartner, RIM had a 55.5% market share of smartphone sales in North America in the first quarter of 2009. Given the BlackBerry's popularity, no doubt other mobile UC solution vendors are also working on a RIM solution.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.