The “official” announcement (read: press release) will come soon enough, but until then, let me say how thrilled the folks at Iperia are to have been recognized by pulvermedia with an inaugural Innovator Award from VON Magazine.

The award goes to Iperia for its IperiaVX service creation platform in general, and its Mobile Visual Voicemail application in specific, as representative of the best and brightest companies creating “the future of Internet Communications.”

In a nifty little twist, there’s an additional achievement yet to be announced - the Judges’ Top 10, which will be revealed at the awards ceremony, taking place on Tuesday, March 18th, at Spring 2008 VON.x in San Jose.

Speaking of the judges, they were drawn from VON Magazine’s “editorial community” (I love that term), including:

Carl Ford, VP of Content and Community Developer for the VON.x Conference and Expo; Bob Emmerson, European Editor, VON Magazine and Euro Innovations e-newsletter; Ross O’Brien, Asia/Pacific Editor, VON Magazine; Bob Frankston, Frankston Innovating and Joel Maloff, founder of The Maloff Company and a contributing columnist for VON Magazine; and Doug Mohney, Editor-in-Chief, VON Magazine and the von:focus e-newsletter.

To win an Innovator Award based on the opinions of this group of industry watchers, thought leaders, and communicators is a honor, and we thank all of them for their consideration.

You have have seen the news on Reuters, TMC, or MSNBC, but in case not, it’s official: IperiaVX has been certified “HiPath Ready (U.S.)” on the Siemens HiPath 8000 Platform.

For us, this is a pretty big deal, because as Iperia Enterprise VP Josh Veshia notes:

“Many of the largest enterprises and service providers in North America rely on Siemens and the strength of their IP solutions … IperiaVX is the first Service Creation platform to successfully complete HiPath 8000 certification. This certification enables Siemens and Iperia to offer a unique value proposition to their customers: The ability to deliver high-margin, high-value communications services for their employees, partners, and clients.

These services, whose time to market used to take a year or more, can now be designed, created, tested, and deployed in just a few months with the IperiaVX Service Creation Platform.”

Though getting a certification like this one is a team effort, I’d like to flag three folks who really brought it all together: Bernd Weimar and Chuck Brooks at Siemens, and Gary Raches at Iperia. These three joined together in the Siemens lab and played a vital role in Iperia’s HiPath 8000 certification.

We’re grateful to these three guys, their teams, and to Siemens Communications in general. Now that it’s all said and done, it looks like the certification process could be the beginning of a great working relationship together.

That’s the headline on an article by Steven Burke on CRN.com, and how, you might ask, has Iperia managed to get in the middle of a clash of titans for unified communications (UC) business? I’ll let Mr. Burke and our own Chris Poer do the explaining:

Chris Poer, vice president of marketing and sales for Billerica, Mass. based Iperia, the maker of the IperiaVX services creation platform, agreed. He said IBM’s middleware software is helping Iperia dramatically reduce development time for creating telecommunications applications for customers.

Poer said IperiaVX combined with IBM middleware has reduced the time it takes to create some service provider applications from definition to implementation from what was once five years to five to seven months. “The development of the actual application is no longer the long pole in the tent,” said Poer. “It no longer defines the length of the process.”

All I know is, anything IBM vs. Microsoft tends to be entertaining, so keep your eye on these two as they square off in the UC market.

Erik Linask, Associate Editor for Internet Telephony magazine, just published this article on the IPCommunications.com website: IperiaVX Leverages VoIP Investments While Reducing Time to Market. In it, Erik not only shows how IperiaVX fits into the larger industry framework, but also breaks the news that IperiaVX is now IMS-compliant, in addition to already being designed to sit on top of IBM’s and BEA’s service delivery platforms.

A brief excerpt:

As with the services Iperia’s customers bring to market, Iperia says timing is everything. The key, as a software company, is to be an early market entrant, so you’re ready to ride the wave as it occurs, because it is difficult to make up ground if you’re caught behind the wave. On the other hand, you also do not want to be too early, where you risk people not understanding what you’re offering.

“In this case,” said Jodoin, “we felt we predicted the wave and are releasing our product just as the swell is coming at us.”

Read the rest of the story here.

The folks at Linux Magazine just released this article by Mary Shacklett about Linux use in the telecommunications industry. Yes, it’s a very smooth and well-researched read. And in full disclosure, Mary’s written a couple of very nice case studies for us.

But the only ties between Mary and Iperia on this article are a few quotes from Iperia COO Art Leondires, including this one about Linux-based IperiaVX:

“The Linux-based offering is a response to the service provider and enterprise markets, which wanted the option of being hardware independent and able to take advantage of lower hardware pricing,” said Art Leondires, Iperia’s Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of Products. “This product runs on standard Linux platforms, and takes advantage of SOA. Enterprises or telecommunications service providers have the capability of rapid service creation through the use of ‘packaged’ Web services that come with the product and that allow sites to customize provisioning and other calling behavior. On the GUI end, we use portlet technology, which allows Iperia’s customers to custom-brand their Web portals.”

And later:

“We are seeing a strong market response to our Linux-based product … Our customers see that the reliability of Linux is right up there with the reliability of other proprietary systems, but Linux gives our customers freedom in their hardware purchase decisions.”

To get access to the full article, you’ll have to go through Linux Magazine’s very thorough registration process. If you’re at all interested in the topic of the article, though, it’ll be worth it.