Peer-to-peer networking applied to enterprise communications services.

OK, you thought P2P was only useful in shady sharing of copyright materials like songs or movies. Not true. In one of the first, and best uses of P2P technology, Nimcat Networks built upon desktop business phones as smart devices loading them up with sufficient horsepower that they can be an IP PBX for itself and learns about the capabilities of peer phones (there's got to be a better name, this feels like describing PCs as 'calculators').

Last month, Ayava acquired Nimcat for their interesting technologies, that are particularly powerful in small business environments. Sort of like a workgroup computing environment. SMB is a space that Avaya would dearly love better penetration. Maybe Nimcat's disruptive technology can drive some success here.

Instead of minimizing the hardware (to keep costs down) capabilities of desktop phones which is what every IP PBX manufacturer has done in order to imbed value in their software server, Nimcat loaded the phone with intelligence and software so that it could be a business phone system with one, or two phones or dozens. Using P2P techniques, they share information and status with each other so that the features of centralized servers are achieved without the central server (single point of failure, and high initial cost). Of course, each unit costs a larger incremental than with the classic IP PBX, but for a segment of the SMB market that's A-OK.

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