Speakeasy, a Seattle based voice over ip services provider has announced a new ‘integrated’ offering which appears to allow the connection of existing telephony infrastructure (analog & digital) including PBXs to their network.

The advantage of the concept is that keeping your old hardware in place and just hooking it up to Speakeasy’s SIP based network will save significant expenditure on hardware procurement. It’s not a particularly new approach to the problem of voip deployment in the sense that analog to voip converters have been around since the first days of voip but the offering of an integrated product with support for fairly-large existing PBXs certainly is.

That’s all assuming I understood their press release correctly

Speakeasy press release: http://www.speakeasy.net/press/pr/pr030209b.php

Asterisk, the lead open-source digital Private Branch Exchange software has released version 1.4.21.

This is a regular bug fix version, a complete changelog can be found here.

Counterpath, makers of the Bria softphone client have launched Quick Conference, an apparently easy-to-use audio conferencing server.

When deployed, Bria (and presumably other SIP standard) users will be able to dial a four digit number to create a conference on the Quick Conference server.

Quick Conference features web-based administration, IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook calendar integration and remote management via PDA.