Looking to emulate the highly successful Asterisk ecosystem business model, IP-PBX pioneer ShoreTel has launched a partner program to extend the choice of integrated solutions available to customers.

Skype Inside: First, an agreement between Toshiba and Skype will build Skype into Toshiba notebooks. Second, German mobile software company Shape Services has launched beta versions of IM+ for Skype software for Java phones, Symbian S60 and Palm OS.

Home networking pioneer Netgear announced a new collaboration with British Ubiquisys to build a residential gateway that integrates a DSL modem, Wi-Fi, VoIP and a femtocell 3G access point. (Femtocells are being promoted for fixed-mobile convergence.) It seems like a natural progression for the company that first made it possible for the average Joe to connect to the Internet. A side benefit is that your cell phone will also work better at home.

For those of you who wish you could take your VoIP service with you when you leave home or office, Chinese manufacturer ATCOM announced a new Mini ATA AG110 that fits in your packet. The company’s website is less than helpful to the English speaker, with howlers like this: “With the powerful R&D capability, ATCOM will keep lunching all kinds of VoIP terminals and devices….” Sounds like Godzilla.

When you take your VoIP service on the road, you’re going to need a broadband connection. Boingo is helping road warriors escape being nickeled-and-dimed to death by WiFi service providers with its global, flat rate, unlimited use service. The company claims to have about 100,000 hot spots. U.S. price is about $40 a month. Earthlink and Nokia are also aiming to let travelers roam free by equipping the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet with Earthlink’s WiFi service at no charge.

Polycom’s Spectralink WiFi phones now comply with the federal government’s security specifications for ’sensitive’ — but not classified — communications. This is the first WiFi phone to achieve this, according to the press release. But it is secure enough for Vice President Strangelove?

If you’ve ever wished you had that great picture of your Maui vacation right there on your cell phone, wish no more. Glide Mobile lets you bring all your files to your phone — even documents. All for free. You’d never guess this from parent company TransMedia’s description of its business: “TransMedia is leading the emergence of rights and identity based, compatible and integrated multipurpose software and services for corporations and consumers.” Huh? Anyway, you can read Glide Mobile’s press release here. (It’s not on the website — go figure.)

With only 2 days left until “i” Day, Ajax software company Backbase is prepping its Ajax framework and developers kit for the Apple Safari 3 browser, Apple’s chosen avenue for value-added applications. Backbase says that its framework will run on the Apple iPhone without modification. You can give it a test run here.

And speaking of tech’s Cabbage Patch Kid, how many people are actually planning to buy one? Not many, according to an online survey at the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. As of this writing, only five percent of the people taking the survey say they’re going to buy one “immediately.” At the other end of the spectrum, 16 percent say they will “never” buy one, 11 percent say “not as long as it’s tied to AT&T for service,” and 27 percent — the largest cohort — say “not while it’s so much more expensive than other options.” You can weigh in here.

P.S. Gartner says the iPhone doesn’t belong in the enterprise.

Unified communications just got more interesting today. Mill Valley, CA-based CommuniGate today launched the Pronto! client interface, based on Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex 2. Targeting both businesses and service providers, Pronto! unifies all Internet communications — from e-mail and IM, to chat, rich media, and groupware — in a single client interface. Later today I’m going to get a demo. More to follow.

VoIP pioneer Packet8 is also getting on the unified communications train, integrating Microsoft Outlook into its Virtual Office hosted PBX.

Shoretel is making it easier for customers to buy with its no-down, 100 percent financing Managed Services Program. Costs stay fixed for 10 years.

No download, no software, no computer. That’s the promise of Rebtel’s new mobile phone VoIP calling service. Try the beta here.

And speaking of mobile VoIP, Mark Ismach recently filed a patent for a method of allowing any mobile phone to place VOIP calls directly. Back in the 1990s, Ismach registered the trademark BIOS (basic input/output system). At the time, manufacturer Phoenix Technologies’ BIOS systems were used in just about every computer made and Phoenix was forced to remove the word “BIOS” from its products. The effect of Ismach’s latest move could be chilling for the mobile VoIP market.

From the lemonade-from-lemons department: Milford, CT telecom equipment company AbleComm has been sitting on a warehouse full of old rotary phones for the past 30 years. Now retro is in and the company is doing a land office business in “New Old Stock” phones, refurbished phones, and reproductions of Western Electric phones from the 1930s through the 1960s. I’m getting a red rotary dial model for my kitchen — the same one my in-laws got in 1955.

Should businesses take an evolutionary approach to VoIP? Or should they bite the bullet and completely replace their existing TDM systems?

Sunnyvale, CA-based privately held ShoreTel, which has been selling IP-PBX systems for business for a decade, says ‘replace.’

ShoreTel VP of Marketing, Steve Timmerman, is blunt.

“The evolutionary approach is good for Avaya. It isn’t good for customers,” he says. “Nobody is investing in TDM anymore – it’s a dead end. The choice for customers is whether you want to go through the death by 1,000 cuts or make the leap once.”

A hybrid environment is complex to manage — Timmerman calls it a “nightmare” — and doesn’t scale. More important, a pure IP environment sets the stage for more efficient business operations and new customer services. “Cost savings isn’t the driver,” Timmerman explains. “The real benefit of pure IP is applying it to the business.”

ShoreTel has been in business for 10 years and was founded as an IP PBX company when few people were thinking about IP telephony besides VoIP pundit Jeff Pulver. Even as recently as 2002, the company hired an engineer from a traditional PBX company that pooh-poohed the idea of IP-PBX.

“He had proposed a voice over Ethernet system and they didn’t believe you could do that,” recalls ShoreTel founder Ed Basart.

Although it’s not as well known as competitor Cisco, ShoreTel has achieved rapid and steady growth — 366 percent over the past five years, according to Timmerman, and has been profitable for the past two. The company’s customers include the City of Oakland, CA and the staffing company, Robert Half International.

Infonetics, Infotech, and Deloitte & Touche rank ShoreTel as one of the fastest growing IP-PBX companies and it was named one of the Silicon Valley Fast 50 by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal.

Timmerman acknowledges that lack of visibility is one of the company’s principal challenges. “We’re in only three of ten deals,” he says. “We’re competing with giants and we beat them on a regular basis.”

He ticks off the ways that ShoreTel’s PBX outpaces the competition.

The first is system architecture. ShoreTel’s PBX is designed more as an appliance rather than a system.

“We have a distributed switch-based architecture – there is no disk or hard drive,” Timmerman explains. “It runs on an embedded operating system - VxWorks.” With server intensive architectures, the design used by many PBX systems, the disk drive is the most likely point of failure. Without these “moving parts,” ShoreTel’s architecture delivers higher reliability, contends Timmerman.

Another benefit of this architecture is scalability. “You can scale from a few users to thousands with a single architecture,” Timmerman explains. “You just add an additional switch to the rack.”

In a comparison of system cost and complexity for Avaya, Cisco, Nortel and ShoreTel by the New York research firm Nemertes, ShoreTel took the first place for set-up ease: an average of 69 minutes. (Avaya was second at 77 minutes, Nortel next at 186 minutes and Cisco took last place with 250 minutes per user).

The second way that ShoreTel shines is ease of configuration, installation and management, according to Timmerman. “We have a one page price book – three switches, two gateways, five phones. You mix and match.”

And customers don’t have to worry about obsolescence. “The 1998 switch is still l supported by the current software,” he says.

ShoreTel comes with a Web browser-based system management application. “Other vendors still have a CLI [command line interface] to manage,” Timmerman explains. “That’s a nightmare. Other vendors have multiple interfaces. ShoreTel has a single image of all your offices. You can manage the entire systems with one view.”

The third competitive feature that Timmerman points to is the company’s ergonomic phones. “Our phones have a unique design. They have a concave surface – they’re easy to look at. Speakers and microphones are high quality.”

ShoreTel also provides a desktop personal call manager GUI. “We have people who never touch the phone,” Timmerman reports. The call manager also interfaces with Microsoft Outlook.

The company also has wireless integration in the pipeline. “We’re working on putting applications on a cell phone that make it look like a phone on the company IP-PBX,” says Timmerman.

But what does all this functionality cost? Here, too, ShoreTel gives competitors a run for their money. Capital, start-up and maintenance costs are a third to half those of other competitors, according to another Nemertes study.

At the same time, ShoreTel gets high marks from customers, receiving a number one ranking for customer service from the Nemertes survey.

“You don’t compete with giants unless you have a better system,” Timmerman observes.