VON Gives Vendors A Voice For Product, Partner Rollouts

Spring VON 2006 opens this week in San Jose, Calif., and many vendors are using the event to highlight new products and partnerships.

Meru Networks will announce an alliance with Catalyst Telecom to distribute Meru’s WLAN solutions, which are optimized to carry voice and data.

One of Meru’s goals is to recruit key Catalyst VARs and train them to develop integrated bundled solutions that support voice and data applications simultaneously in the enterprise, according to Ihab Abu-Hakima, president and CEO of Meru, Sunnyvale, Calif.

“Teaming up with Catalyst is part of Meru’s push to run voice as a primary application over the WLAN, and the relationship will help us reach VARs who can handle VoWLAN [Voice-over-WLAN] deployments,” Abu-Hakima said.

Monte Seifers, technology director at Converged Solutions Group, a Nashville, Tenn.-based solution provider, said Meru gear is ideal for VoWLAN deployments because it enables quick handoff times between access points. “Meru provides an elegant solution that doesn’t require proprietary clients,” he said.Communications equipment vendor Adtran will show off its new NetVanta 7100 switch router, a Session Initiation Protocol-based PBX for small businesses. The all-in-one box, available now for $5,195, incorporates a router, a VPN, a stateful firewall and a 24-port PoE switch, according to Paul Smelser, product manager at Adtran, Huntsville, Ala.

Level 3 Communications, whose channel program enables VARs with VoIP expertise to resell Level 3’s bandwidth on a private-label basis, will reveal details of a large nationwide retail VoIP deal won recently by two of its partners, Bandwidth.com and Sylantro Systems, according to Craig Schlagbaum, vice president of channel development at Level 3, Broomfield, Co.

Reston, Va.-based XO Communications will launch a wholesale VoIP service that will make it easier for broadband and cable companies to take their VoIP offerings into new markets.

D-Link, Fountain Valley, Calif., will take the wraps off a Wi-Fi flip-phone for use with the Public SIP Telephone Network (PsipTN), a global virtual network that can handle multimedia content in addition to PSTN voice calls.