Avaya Inc. is busy bolstering its VOIP story for branch offices as research firms named the vendor, along with Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), the market leaders in enterprise voice-over-IP.

According to Synergy Research Group Inc. , the overall market for enterprise IP telephony in the second quarter grew just over 30 percent year-on-year, driven largely by sales of IP phones. Synergy ranks Cisco as the top enterprise VOIP vendor, noting that the firm shipped over 1 million IP phones.

Indian market research firm iLocus says that while Cisco dominated the IP deskphone market in the second quarter, Avaya leads the market for IP-PBXes. In its weekly newsletter, iLocus estimates that vendors shipped a total of about 4.2 million IP-PBX end-user licenses, generating revenue of $625 million in the quarter (iLocus did not break out Avaya's share of those figures). Around 2.2 million desktop IP phones were shipped in the same time period, representing about $304 million in revenue worldwide.

ILocus also names SpectraLink Corp. as the top provider of WiFi VOIP phones for the quarter, beating out Cisco and others.

Avaya, meanwhile, has introduced two new products aimed at remote workers and branch office deployments. Avaya says that its one-X Quick Edition eliminates the need for a central VOIP server and, using SIP-based peer-to-peer technology, embeds the functionality of a PBX into the phones. This should allow small office locations to reduce costs by routing voice traffic over an Internet connection. While companies on the move can use the software to set up temporary offices for events or following a natural disaster.

The firm has also introduced Avaya VPNremote for IP Phones 2.0 software to enable businesses to embed virtual private network (VPN) capabilities into Avaya IP phones. The idea behind the software is that employees working in remote locations away from their main office can now install a secure IP phone in their home without help from hard-pressed IT staff. — Dan Jones, Site Editor, Unstrung