Vertical Communications, Inc. is a

corporation A corporation is an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and ...

that specializes in cloud and premises-based private branch exchanges, i.e., business telephone systems. Vertical Communications changed its name on January 1, 2005 from Artisoft, Inc. after acquiring Vertical Networks in September 2004. In September 2005, Vertical Communications acquired Comdial. On December 1, 2006, Vodavi Technology was acquired by Vertical Communications.

Products

Vertical offers new telecommunications products, as well as products from legacy product lines including: As of 2018/2019, some of these are sold as refurbished units by equipment brokers.

Partner programs

Vertical sells almost exclusively through a

value-added reseller A value-added reseller (VAR) is a company that adds features or services to an existing product, then resells it (usually to end-users) as an integrated product or complete "turn-key" solution. This practice occurs commonly in the electronics or IT ...

(VAR) channel. Partners must meet certain minimum requirements to become a VAR, including purchasing a demo system and qualifying technical personnel by having them attend online training.

Artisoft

Tucson, Arizona , "(at the) base of the black

ill ILL may refer to: * ''I Love Lucy'', a landmark American television sitcom * Illorsuit Heliport (location identifier: ILL), a heliport in Illorsuit, Greenland * Institut Laue–Langevin, an internationally financed scientific facility * Interlibrar ...

, nicknames = "The Old Pueblo", "Optics Valley", "America's biggest small town" , image_map = , mapsize = 260px , map_caption = Interactive ...

-based Artisoft was the first company to offer peer-to-peer networking. The name of its

network operating system A network operating system (NOS) is a specialized operating system for a network device such as a router, switch or firewall. Historically operating systems with networking capabilities were described as network operating systems, because they a ...

was

LANtastic LANtastic is a peer-to-peer local area network (LAN) operating system for DOS and Microsoft Windows (and formerly OS/2). The ''New York Times'' described the network, which permits machines to function both as servers and as workstations, as al ...

. In 1996 the company acquired for $12.8 million. ''Stylus Innovation'', noted for its Barcode-based remote shopping product, was founded in 1991 by

Krisztina 'Z' Holly Krisztina Holly, known by her colleagues as 'Z' is a Hungarian American innovator, entrepreneur, and adventurer. Holly is best known as the creator of the first TEDx, the founding executive director of the Deshpande Center for Technological I ...

, Mike Cassidy and John Barrus. ''Stylus Innovation'' came to public attention by winning the ''Grand-Prize'' in the 1991

MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition The MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is a student-managed business plan competition, where undergraduates and postgraduates from various programs and all levels at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) organize and enter the compe ...

Legacy

Artisoft bought TeleVantage, and renamed the latter Artisoft TeleVantage. However, with Microsoft's

Windows for Workgroups Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on April 6, 1992, as a successor to Windows 3.0. Like its predecessors, the Windows 3.1 series ran as a shell on top of MS-DOS. Codenamed Janus, Window ...

"eating into" LANtastic's lead (as was Novell). and then free "bundled networking software" in Windows 95 and 98, the company "saw the handwriting on the wall." LANtastic's originator, Artisoft Televantage, sold "Legacy" technology ("LANtastic") t
Spartacom Technologies
in 2000. The latter, which subsequently was acquired b
PC Micro
continued to market and maintain LANtastic. Version 8.01, released in 2006, can network PCs running MS-DOS (also PC DOS) 5.0 or later and Windows 3.x up to 7.(For case of Windows XP and 7, some limitations apply).

Vertical redirect

In September 2004 Artisoft, minus its former LANtastic technology, purchased Vertical and, effective January 2005, renamed itself Vertical Communications Inc. Vertical now had two non-competing main products, Televantage (for firms with under 1,000 phones and "one or more locations" and Vertical's "own" InstantOffice, "a Voice-over-IP phone system ... for large enterprises with many locations."

References

{{Reflist Companies traded over-the-counter in the United States Telecommunications companies established in 1982 Telecommunications companies of the United States 1982 establishments in California