BT, a provider of communications solutions and services operating in more than 170 countries, has said that the company’s corporate voice-communication solution, BT Onevoice, will integrate advanced voice services from BT's open innovation platform Ribbit, bringing feature-rich voice applications to the desktop.  Ribbit is an open platform for communication innovation, bringing together the Internet, voice and data to form a new world of intelligent, integrated communication solutions

BT officials said that Onevoice Ribbit v1.0 connects the worlds of the web and traditional corporate voice networks by embedding Ribbit's voice features into any existing corporate telephony environments.

According to company officials, the service is aimed at multinational customers looking to realize the benefits converged communications deliver. 

It will also significantly lower operational, network and administration costs by keeping voice calls on-net, minimizing expensive international calls.

Company officials said that Onevoice Ribbit v1.0 will provide users with a single direct dial phone number for all incoming and outgoing calls making it easier for customers, suppliers and partners to contact them first time. 

Users will be able to define how calls are routed through the Onevoice VPN to reach them if they are away from their office. 

According to company officials, calls will be delivered on-net to other sites directly to the Ribbit softphone or via the nearest PSTN breakout point to any number globally, minimizing international call costs. 

Users can choose to have multiple device options for making and receiving calls through the Onevoice network offering significant call savings on mobile bills.

"Delivering Ribbit to Onevoice customers enables them to start the journey to unified communications and accelerate the adoption of communications applications to the desktop.  Its innovative features also make users lives significantly simpler while enabling the organization to spend less”, said Neil Sutton, vice president, global portfolio, BT Global Services, in a statement. 

Sutton said that this announcement shows the company’s commitment to help customers transform their business, drive down costs and help them increase productivity.

The cloud-based service, company officials said, includes a softphone which gives users easy access to a range of advanced call features for calling any BT Onevoice on-net number, according to their corporate dial-plan, in addition to off-net public numbers. 

Enterprise calls can be originated from a softphone, and all on-net numbers and services such as BT Conferencing audio bridges can be accessed at a fraction of the cost of a mobile or hotel phone call.

The service will be released to selected customers in beta this summer, with full release expected by the end of this year.

By Anil Sharma.