This week some of the IP world’s most influential and innovative companies will gather at the VON Conference & Expo to showcase their wares and build relationships with colleagues, peers, customers, partners and competitors alike. VON recently spoke with one of those exhibitors, Smoothstone IP Communications, and what follows is a transcript of the conversation with James Whitemore, chief marketing officer for Smoothstone.

VON: What is Smoothstone’s position in the IP world?

James Whitemore: Smoothstone is rather unique in our part of the industry. We’ve spent almost a decade focusing on the needs of the mid-sized enterprise – companies who have hundreds/thousands of employees in multiple geographic locations across the country.

To these companies, Smoothstone provides a full suite of unified IP communications solutions, delivered as cloud-based, on-demand applications. We offer clients access to the latest in IP communications technologies without the headaches of owning and operating their own communications infrastructure.

Our services include hosted Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP); IP trunking; unified threat management; MPLS networking; contact center solutions; messaging and advanced collaboration tools. These scalable, on-demand applications and services can be integrated with a customer’s existing network and telecommunications infrastructure, operational processes and employee activities, enabling a customer to migrate to unified IP communications as their business requirements dictate.

VON: What’s new at Smoothstone?

JW: It’s been an exciting year for Smoothstone. We just released an announcement regarding a strategic alliance with inContact as part of a movement towards federated, cloud-based computing. We recently became a Gold level member of the Avaya DevConnect program and have developed new partnerships with a number of VARs across the industry.

VON: Why did Smoothstone decide to exhibit at the VON Expo?

Whitemore: VON is an important event that allows Smoothstone to reach service providers who are looking for new partners to deliver unified IP communications to their clients. We believe VON to be the perfect opportunity to interact with those VARs and IT managers who are looking for a better way to reduce their communications costs and increase their overall productivity.

VON: What will Smoothstone be showcasing at the show?

JW: Smoothstone attends VON for the same reason many other companies: to meet new people and to get our finger on the pulse of the industry. Traditionally, we don’t time our product updates or releases for conventions.

VON: What do you think is in store for the IP/network convergence industries?

JW: For some time, analysts have been forecasting unified communications as one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009. Their expected growth rate in this industry was around 20 percent. So far, we’re more than doubled that. So, we’re definitely seeing a shift in the enterprise marketplace towards IP-based unified communications, like VoIP.

We believe that having these offerings delivered as a cloud-based, on-demand applications only strengthens this move towards IP-based convergence. We have been actively working with service providers across the industry to layer our voice and data services across their MPLS networks.

In the end, there’s no question there are real cost savings with IP-based convergence. And that’s one of the reasons Smoothstone is attending VON, to help IT managers who are tasked with finding new solutions that increase corporate productivity and help their company save money in the process.