In The News

The desk phone fell to the fifth position among corporate communication devices in 2012 previews, behind the smartphone, laptop, computer and tablet, and down from the third spot in 2011, a survey by Infonetics Research Inc. found. However, the president of Colorado’s Fountainhead Networks Inc., Stephen Crockett, said in an e-mail that “desk phones won’t be going away any time soon.”

ShoreTel Inc. (SHOR) agreed to acquire cloud-computing company M5 Networks for up to $162.4 million in cash and stock, adding to the online telephone provider’s software portfolio.

ShoreTel makes voice-over-Internet-protocol products, which use computer networks to make telephone services more flexible and less expensive. M5′s technology provides its communication services through the cloud, a term used to describe networks that can host customers’ software and data off-site.

M5 is a telecom company based in New York City that offers Internet phone services. But it offers something else for its employees: At the Rochester, N.Y., office of M5, workers are gearing up for a companywide battle of the bands against other branches.

Live Answer Service Metric is a KPI (Key Performance indicator), allowing M5 customers to measure how often their staff are picking up their phones as opposed to letting calls going to voicemail. This metric was once only available to advanced contact centers is now available to the entire enterprise.

M5 Networks – a provider of cloud-based telephone services for businesses – is teaming up with the Hochstein School of Music for a program called M5 Rocks. M5 Rocks is about much more than just finding time to jam: There’s no better way to build a team than to start a band.

It’s that time of year again when we reflect back on our hits, misses and lessons learned over the past 12 months. While this is important, I think it is just as useful (and perhaps more fun) to look forward and predict what the New Year will bring.

M5 Networks, a market leader in cloud communications for business, announced today it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service. Gartner, the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, placed M5 Networks in the Visionaries quadrant based on completeness of vision and ability to execute.

APIs have been one of the most important technologies to have come out of the Web 2.0 revolution. Today, data has become a service. Most major web sites can now be hacked apart, and their components re-used and slapped together to create other sites. M5 Networks uses APIs to connect their clients’ phone systems to their customer-relationship management (CRM) software, because it improves productivity and analytics.

M5 Networks, a provider of cloud communications for business, has released M5 Connect for Salesforce version 4.0. The new version introduces support for the Google Chrome browser as well support for the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox. M5 Connect for Salesforce.com enhances sales effectiveness by unifying the data in Salesforce with intelligence from the phone system.

M5 Networks, the market leader in cloud-based business phone systems, today announced the availability of the SiriusDecisions ‘M5 Networks Vendor Profile’ in their Sales Effectiveness category.