As the unified communications space continues to heat up, as well as diversify in its technology capabilites, companies like U4EA (News - Alert) Technologies are extending their services to deliver unified IP communication solutions to include voice, video, data and security services wrapped in one bundle.

 

And this week Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC (News - Alert)) recognized those efforts by naming the Fremont, California-based company’s Fusion 500 Multi-service Business Gateway (MSBG) as a recipient of the first annual NGN Leadership Award presented by NGN Magazine.

 

The Fusion 500 is an all-in-one CPE device geared toward the small and medium enterprises market with its voice, video, data and security services available to companies with up to 1000 employees.

 

“As SMBs and enterprise branch offices increasingly seek to add real-time and near real-time capabilities, such as video conferencing, collaboration and desktop sharing, to their to their existing VoIP and legacy voice services, effective bandwidth management and QoS become critical,” said Jeff Dixon, U4EA’s chief strategy officer.

 

The NGN Leadership Award was established to recognize outstanding achievement in the IP Communications community, including outstanding products, services and technologies relating to IMS and NGN environments. U4EA was recognized for the innvative capabilities of the Fusion 500 that includes a PRI/T1/E1 Gateway (News - Alert) port, firewall, NAT, VPN support, multiple WAN interface types, emergency connections to the PSTN that supports up to 250 simultaneous phone calls.

 

While the Fusion 500 offers the only QoS mechanism that guarantees performance of multiple real-time applications, providing users the benefits of high performance UC applications, without the need for sophisticated IT resources, it is only part of a larger story for U4EA.

 

In fact, the service was just part of a bigger picture in what was a big growth year for U4EA as the company began 2008 with a single multi-service business gateway product, which supported up to 30 users, and a signaling gateway resulting from U4EA’s acquisition of J6 Technologies, according Dixon.

 

“During 2008, the company developed and rolled out an entire line of home office and multi-service business gateways serving the smallest SOHO user all the way up to the 250-person SMB or branch office. U4EA also acquired NextHop (News - Alert), a supplier of Wireless 802.11 software, and – as a result – introduced a WLAN solution designed to meet SMB WiFi demand,” Dixon recently told Rich Tehrani, president of TMC.