R&D throughout the industry has led to significant steps in innovation this year. VARBusiness Tech Innovator Awards recognize the most innovative of these offerings from several different sectors.
Vendors submitted hundreds of entries for the 2008 VARBusiness Tech Innovator Awards, but only a handful emerged as purveyors of unique, groundbreaking products. Here's a look at the winners.
HP's first touch-screen notebook for consumers has plenty of options for work and play.
Agito Networks Offers 'Dual Persona' Mobile Phone Capability
2:59 PM EDT Mon. Sep. 08, 2008
RoamAnywhere is a fixed-mobile convergence system that combines Wi-Fi, cellular, IP telephony and location-awareness technology. Tying those together allows for seamless handover from one system to another while reducing telecommunications expenses, the company said. A mobile phone user calling from within his office, for example, can route the call through the company's PBX rather than a more expensive cellular network.
The new RoamAnywhere Version 2.0 supports more than 30 types of handsets running the Symbian S60 Series and Windows Mobile 6 standard and professional operating systems. That's up from about 10 handsets in the original release. The new release also supports native line-side support for Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft, Nortel and Asterisk IP-PBXs. Support for BlackBerry devices and the Apple iPhone are in the works.
Support for Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform is a key item for INX Inc., a Houston-based mobility and unified communications solution provider, said Tim Forehand, INX mobility solutions manager. While INX has worked with RoamAnywhere since early this year, the limited handset support offered by the earlier version hindered how broadly INX could sell the product. "I see this a true application that we can really push," he said of the new release. "I'm very excited about this." INX will work the Agito system into its voice over wireless LAN solution.
The product's other major advance, the dual persona feature, allows a mobile phone to accept calls to both a business phone number and a personal number, according to Pej Roshan, Agito co-founder and marketing VP. Forehand at INX said the system's ability to switch between business- and personal-mode automatically is a plus: "These solutions need to be seamless to the end-user to be successful," he said.
The new release also incorporates Secure Remote Voice, a technology that provides mobile phone communications over secure "voice over WLAN" connections from home, hotels and public Wi-Fi connections. It also now offers dynamic least-cost routing capabilities.
The new RoamAnywhere release is priced starting at approximately $10,000 for the 2000 Series and $28,000 for the 4000 Series. Agito sells both direct and through channel partners.
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