ReadWriteWeb

Not long ago, video conferencing was science fiction - now it's a key part of many enterprises' communication strategy. According to a survey conducted by LifeSize, 51% of mid-sized enterprises polled use video conferencing and the majority of those that don't are planning to. And it's getting cheaper, easier and more ubiquitous. Several pieces of news in the past couple weeks are illuminating some key trends in enterprise video conferencing. Here's what we're seeing.

Somewhat overshadowed by today's news that Skype is partnering with Facebook comes a long expected announcement from the VOIP company: it is also partnering with telephony company Avaya to offer unified communication services. This follows Skype moving its business focused Skype Connect service out of beta. Of the "big three" unified communications companies (Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft), Avaya is the least well known, so this partnership may bring some cachet to the company's offerings.

The end of Google Wave and rumors that the company is building a Facebook competitor has a lot of people talking about Google's need to get better at social. Fortune's article on Google's future growth last month, apart from highlighting absurdity a company becoming "too successful," speculates as to what Google will need to do in order to continue growing in the future. The article's authors dismiss Google Apps for Enterprise and move on to sexier fair, discussing what Google needs to do to be more "social." But it's clear that Google has big plans for the enterprise. First, of course, because Eric Schmidt has said so, but also because of the various steps the company is taking.

Today Skype officially moved Skype Connect (formerly known as Skype for SIP), its first product targeted at enterprise customers, out of beta. Skype Connect will enable business customers to use Skype over regular PBX phones or unified communication systems from Avaya, Cisco, SIPfoundry, ShoreTel and others. The announcement follows a rumor that Cisco made a bid for the VOIP company and Google's addition of voice calling in Gmail.

Skype estimates 37% of its users use the service for business purposes. Although Network World has reported that Skype for SIP was difficult to setup in the past, it seems Skype has taken some steps to improve this.

Guest author TJ Thinakaran, of CallFire, recently told you that voice app creation is important. But where to start? QuickFuse is a simple point-and-click voice app creation service from automated telephony provider Plum Voice, which the company calls "Yahoo! Pipes for voice apps." Plum Voice has announced that over 10,000 users have created voice apps with the service.

It's been a long time coming, but Google just announced that Google Voice is now open for everyone. Until today, Google Voice was an invite-only service, though Google slowly opened up the doors to more users over the last few months and the service already has over one million users. Starting today, anybody with a Google Account in the U.S. can open a Google Voice account and get a Google Voice phone number without having to wait for an invitation.

It's been a long time coming, but according to a message posted to the Google Voice Twitter account this morning, as well as a posting on the Google Blog, Google is getting ready to open up its free Google Voice service to more users. According to NBC's Janet Shamlian, who did a piece about Google Voice for the Today Show this morning, the service might actually open up for all U.S. users today - though as much as we would like this to be true, we think the reporter got this part of the story wrong. If you haven't done so already, however, now would be a good time to get your invite request in, as Google will first let in users who requested invites before opening up the service to everybody.

We have used Google Voice ever since it was still GrandCentral (Google acquired GrandCentral in July 2007) and couldn't be happier with the service, so here is our rundown of what you can expect once you get your own Google Voice number.

Earlier this year RWW reported that Google had made plans for the telephony service it acquired in July, 2007 called GrandCentral. GrandCentral was reborn as Google Voice, which includes all of GrandCentral's features and much more. Google Voice's free service will allow users to unify all of their phone numbers and transfer calls to all of their devices, convert voice calls to text messages, call multiple parties at once and make discounted international calls.

This week, John Fontana of Network World reported that Google has reserved 1 million phone numbers with communications and information services company Level 3. The company has not announced anything yet, but on the GrandCentral website it says "if you are a GrandCentral user, over the next few days you will be prompted to upgrade to Google Voice". These look like clear signs that it is getting ready to go live any time now, so check those emails and get ready to claim your number, they could go fast.

T-Mobile is working on plans to build several devices that run Google's Android operating system but can't really be considered phones, according to internal documents secured by the New York Times this weekend. The revelation appears to provide more evidence to the argument that Android isn't really a mobile phone's operating system because in the future there won't be devices thought of as phones.

There's no good reason for phones to continue to exist as distinct devices for voice communication. For all intents and purposes, there will be no phones in the future - only portable data devices used for all kinds of communication, voice being an equal partner with the web.