Alteva, Siemens announce offerings

Plus FCC reconsiders its position on how to regulate broadband

VoIP, unified messaging, products and services

Today we highlight three new items: Alteva is offering hosted unified communications, Siemens Enterprise has announced a OpenScape Contact Center V8, and the Washington Post reports the FCC may be reconsidering their approach to regulating broadband access.

Alteva, a UC service provider headquartered in Philadelphia, has announced it is partnering with Microsoft and BroadSoft to offer a hosted UC solution to small businesses. The solution will interconnect hosted voice and messaging services with the Microsoft Communication Services product suite.

How the FCC can still move on net neutrality

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Today we highlight three new items: Alteva is offering hosted unified communications, Siemens Enterprise has announced a OpenScape Contact Center V8, and the Washington Post reports the FCC may be reconsidering their approach to regulating broadband access.

Alteva, a UC service provider headquartered in Philadelphia, has announced it is partnering with Microsoft and BroadSoft to offer a hosted UC solution to small businesses. The solution will interconnect hosted voice and messaging services with the Microsoft Communication Services product suite.

How the FCC can still move on net neutrality

Commenting on the offer in a statement, Louis Hayner, chief sales officer at Alteva, said, "Alteva's UC product with the full suite of Microsoft Communication Services products integrated with voice over IP phone service, allows for a truly cloud-based UC environment where basic business-based technology like voice is combined with office communications."

Alteva also launched a Web store targeting organizations with less than 25 users that can be used to help customers select the appropriate UC solutions. The company provides four UC bundles ranging from its "UC Complete" priced at $38 per user, per month to the "Alteva Desktop Communications Basic" at $15 per user, per month.

In other news, Siemens Enterprise Communications has released of OpenScape Contact Center V8, which is designed to optimize data center and virtualized environments. SEC customers can run OpenScape Contact Center V8 software on their VMware data center infrastructure, rather than on proprietary hardware at each location, according to the company.

OpenScape Contact Center V8 also features Web-based agent, supervisor and management desktops.

The new Contact Center capabilities follow on the heels of SEC's recently announced relationship with VMware that resulted in similar changes to the company's OpenScape Unified Communications Server 2010 that we reported in late March.

Finally, the Washington Post has reported that the FCC is reconsidering its position on how to regulate broadband, influenced by a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruling in April 2010 that found the FCC had exceeded its authority in 2008 when it applied sanctions against Comcast -- sanctions that were meant to enforce the FCC policies on net neutrality. We last reported on the FCC's approach to net neutrality in October 2009 and it now appears the FCC will need a new approach to the net neutrality issue, along with different ideas on how it will regulate broadband access and content. Any eventual regulatory framework will also need to integrated with the national broadband plan that the FCC sent to Congress in March 2010 -- but that's a whole other newsletter that we leave for a future issue.

Read more about voip & convergence in Network World's VoIP & Convergence section.

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