Vertical Communications

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Vertical Communications, Inc.

Type	public NASDAQ:[1]
Founded	1982
Headquarters	Cambridge, MA
Key people	Bill Tauscher, CEO; Ken Clinebell, CFO; Scott Pickett, CTO
Industry	Communications Software
Products	Software PBXs; business telephone systems; IP-PBXs
Employees	N/A
Slogan	N/A
Website	http://www.vertical.com

Vertical Communications, Inc. NASDAQ: VRCC is a corporation that specializes in software-based PBXes (eg business telephone systems). Vertical Communications changed its name on 1 January, 2005 from Artisoft, Inc. after acquiring Vertical Networks in September 2004. Artisoft originally produced the networking product LANtastic until Microsoft drove them out of the market by offering TCP/IP networking in the Windows platform. In September 2005, Vertical Communications acquired Comdial. In October 2006, Vodavi agreed to be acquired by Vertical Communications of Cambridge, Massachusetts, pending shareholder approval.

1 Products
2 Partner Programs
3 Miscellaneous Information
4 External links

[edit] Products

The company offers two primary products: Vertical TeleVantage is a software PBX that runs on Windows server platforms using the Intel Dialogic hardware. This product is meant for small and medium-sized businesses and scales from 4 phone lines and 8 phones up to 288 phone lines and 720 phones (maximum tested size on one server). This product came from Artisoft. Vertical Networks contributed the InstantOffice product which is focused on large enterprises who need to centrally manage a large number of smaller phone systems across multiple locations. The InstantOffice product also runs on Windows server, but it uses a highly-customized and proprietary server as well as proprietary digital phones and interface cards. Both products support multiple interfaces including digital phones, analog phones, Voice Over IP VOIP connections, voice T-1s, and analog phone lines. The company intends to integrate capabilities of each product into the other, but maintain separate products focused on separate markets. TeleVantage currently supports the IO digital phones. InstantOffice will gain call center features found in TeleVantage.

[edit] Partner Programs

Vertical sells almost exclusively through a Value-Added Reseller (VAR) channel. Partners must meet certain minimum requirements to become a VAR, including purchasing a demo system and qualifying technical personnel by sending them to a training class. The requirements are reasonably minimal and many companies have signed up to be VARs to get access to the reduced cost of software and access to support so as to provide themselves with a cutting-edge phone system. At this time, there are approximately 200 committed resellers. InstantOffice is sold through a separate partner channel with only two companies currently qualified as integration partners. As this product is targeted at very large enterprises, very large partners are needed to sell and deploy it. The two partners currently are Fujitsu and IBM.