By Johna Till Johnson, president & chief research officer, Nemertes Research

The recent acquisition of NetSolve (Nasdaq:NTSL) and privately-held Dynamicsoft by Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) illustrates the increasing importance of software and services to IP telephony. NetSolve, for which Cisco is paying roughly $128, provides remote-management services, including 24X7 management and support for IP telephony solutions. Dynamicsoft, for which Cisco’s paying $53 million, develops SIP gateways for telecom providers seeking to offer IP telephony and other converged services.

The significance: IP telephony is increasingly becoming a software and services play, as Nemertes has long stressed. Cisco’s top competitors--particularly Nortel and Avaya—are now winning deals based on the sophistication of their software functionality and their ability to deliver end-to-end services.

Specifically, presence has gone from a “nice-to-have” to a “need-to-have” for IP telephony software. Virtually 100% of IT executives participating in Nemertes’ upcoming Virtual Workplace benchmark indicate they expect presence technologies to become pervasive throughout their organizations—which highlights the significance of Dynamicsoft’s integrated presence engine., which integrates multiple sources of presence (mobile/GSM, SIP, SOAP, Calendar, and others) Although Dynamicsoft’s target customers are service providers rather than enterprises, we anticipate that presence-based services will also become ubiquitous.

The complete Impact Analysis is available to Nemertes clients. For more information, please contact Chris Zimmerman at christine@nemertes.com