Vertical Communications, Inc. is a

corporation A corporation or body corporate is an individual or a group of people, such as an association or company, that has been authorized by the State (polity), state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law as ...

that specialized in 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. As of 2018/2019, limited products could be purchased of refurbished units from 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 or complete " turn-key" product. This practice occurs commonly in the electronics or IT industr ...

(VAR) channel.

History

Artisoft

Tucson, Arizona Tucson (; ; ) is a city in Pima County, Arizona, United States, and its county seat. It is the second-most populous city in Arizona, behind Phoenix, Arizona, Phoenix, with a population of 542,630 in the 2020 United States census. The Tucson ...

-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 ...

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 allow ...

. 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 "Z" Holly is a Hungarian Americans, Hungarian-American entrepreneur. Holly is best known as being the creator of TEDx, the founding executive director of the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at the Massachusetts Institute ...

, 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 comp ...

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 run as a Shell (computing), shell on top of MS-DOS; it was t ...

"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 Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also known as IP telephony, is a set of technologies used primarily for voice communication sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. VoIP enables voice calls to be transmitted as ...

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 Software companies of the United States