East Coast gets Verizon's iobi

Verizon Monday unveiled its enterprise version of its iobi integrated voice and data messaging service for Eastern seaboard residents from Maine south to Virginia. The company already released residential and small business versions of the product, based on software it developed internally.

Aimed at large enterprises, governments and school districts, iobi Enterprise aids workers by allowing them to easily manage phone calls, voice and data messages from either a computer Web interface or a voice portal. It enables Verizon Centrex users to take advantage of iobi's services as well.

As workers become more mobile and more frequently work from remote sites, a unified messaging service lets them remain productive, said Ed McGuinness, senior vice president of marketing for Verizon Enterprise Solutions Group.

"The service is accessible anywhere, anytime, so employees can remain productive no matter where they are," he said in a Web conference. "It allows employees to efficiently manage their own mobility. The time to market is very fast because iobi requires no infrastructure to be deployed on customer site so it can be deployed in a matter of days."

Using computers from Sun Microsystems and an application platform from BroadSoft, Verizon developed iobi internally, as a network-based software application that doesn't require additional hardware, said Lorena McCalister, director of product management in Verizon's Enterprise Solutions Group.

The service includes easy-to-use voice, personal information manager and productivity applications. For example, workers can see who's calling on their computer screen before the phone rings and chose to take a call, forward it to another phone or send it to voice mail, based on who's calling. They can forward voice mail messages as attachments to e-mails or through an Instant Messaging service that exists within the enterprise.

As part of the announcement, Neal Sturm, associate vice president and chief information officer at Fairleigh Dickinson University, provided a personal testimonial based on his trial experience of the service, saying it enabled him to stay in closer touch with staff and family and to be more efficient. The university is adding iobi to its service and the many features "may add new life and create new interest in the traditional phones in the students' dorm rooms," he said.

Iobi should also give new life to Centrex, said McCalister. About half of Verizon Enterprise Solutions' Group's customers have Centrex for all or part of their service, said McGuinness.