Just yesterday, I reported on Dell and Fonality teaming up to offer VoIP solutions to small businesses. Today, I ran across an article announcing a partnership between PC manufacturer Lenovo and Avaya. While this partnership is not half as interesting as the Dell/Fonality deal, it looks like a sign for things to come in 2008.

This partnership, unfortunately, seems to be limited to Lenovo preinstalling Avaya’s IP softphone onto its ThinkPad notebooks and ThinkCentre desktops. While the press release touts that the computer system has become a phone, others, myself included, may just consider this as another bloatware installation.

Still, both the Dell and Lenovo deal introduce a change we may see with other vendors soon and which will help spread corporate VoIP adoption. Who’s willing to take a bet on a HP/Microsoft OCS partnership announcement in 2008?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 14:35 CET and is filed under Hardware, Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.