Here’s another one of those silly bets politicians and businesses make whenever the local boys are in a Super Bowl or World Series: 

After winning last year's World Series bet with a Tampa-based company, Philadelphia-based Alteva, an enterprise hosted VoIP and unified communications provider, has bet Philadelphia pretzels against New York bagels with Stage 2 Networks, a New York-based vendor of hosted PBX (News - Alert) and converged network tools.

This year there's a humiliation factor -- the 2009 loser will also don opposing team's fan wear and have a photo session with a banner acknowledging the winner in front of either New York City's Times Square or the Rocky statue in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Hope the Alteva (News - Alert) folks enjoy their trip to the Big Apple.

"After winning bushels of Florida oranges last year, we bought a juicer and got accustomed to drinking fresh squeezed orange juice at breakfast meetings... the only thing missing is a good bagel," said William Bumbernick, CEO of Alteva in an incredibly sly reference to Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez's admission that he was using banned steroids, or "juicing." "We enjoy doing things like this as its fun for the company, overall morale and we get to show our support of our home team."

Joseph P. Gillette, CEO of Stage 2 Networks, said that the only previous Yankees-Phillies World Series was played back in 1950, "so we're looking forward to going head-to-head almost 60 years later. We're also looking forward to eating lots of Philly pretzels."

Which they will.

Last month, Alteva and "about a dozen of its peers" reportedly banded together to ensure and advertise, under a single name, their service, according to Alteva CEO Bill Bumbernick.

The report said the group is also working to create “a peering environment that expands the capabilities of HD voice and video call."  It also said, "it sounds as if the effort also may involve leveraging the combined members’ size to get better deals for SIP peering with companies not in the group."