Watch Telephony's Security Webcast Find out what Verizon Business is doing with managed network security and how service providers can cash in with this new service. Watch Telephony's Webcast today.

Sylantro Systems entered into a 3-year agreement with Covad Communications this week that builds on the companies' existing relationship and will provide subscriber licenses and associated services to Covad for its voice-over-IP vPBX and other services.

Sylantro also signed an agreement with Microsoft to integrate their platforms and co-market and sell voice-enabled hosted collaboration and Microsoft Office applications. The company also announced a new release of software that features the first Macromedia Flash-based technology for consumer and business portal applications.

"It will allow service providers to incorporate not just new functionality, but will also allow them to customize portals 75% faster than previous releases," said Bernard Gutnick, vice president of product marketing for Sylantro. The Flash technology can enable users to set time-of-day and day-of-week routing for their calls and messages and helps enable the retrieval of voice mail messages from any computer.

"Ninety-eight percent of the computers in the U.S. are already enabled for Flash technology. It requires much less effort in configuring all the capabilities we are adding to the new release," Gutnick said.

The Covad agreement, which originally resulted in the nationwide rollout of business-class VoIP services, including the Sylantro-based vPBX service, will be expanded to a multi-million dollar deal that addresses Covad's next phase of service deployment of advanced hosted services.

Sylantro sees the Covad contract extension and its own 100% growth year-over-year as proof that hosted VoIP service has gained acceptance in both the consumer and business markets. "The market is evolving from what was the investment years of 2003 to 2004 to the deployment years of 2005 and beyond," Gutnick said.