Popular Telephony made news today when they announced the commercial release of a peer-to-peer serverless communication system for SoHo customers. The solution blends the PeerioBiz soft phone and Peerio Gateway with the Skype network.

The announcement is significant for SoHo/SMBs, in that this solution essentially eliminates the need for a PBX.

Users employ the PeerioBiz softphone client, which is based on Popular Telephony’s Peerio serverless middleware. When installed across the workplace, PeerioBiz forms a telephony system ‘sans PBX’ while supporting a range of standard PBX features.

The Peerio Gateway for Skype enables customers to originate and terminate calls with Skype In/Out service or to interconnect directly with Skype users on a true peer-to-peer basis.

According to Gavin McFadyen, Director Product Management at Popular Telephony, “We worked with small business customers to identify the functionality that will be easy to use and which enables them to combine the inexpensive calling benefit of Skype with vital feature functionality of Peerio. This includes such enterprise and Centrex like features as call transfer, conferencing, call park, and others that our research showed the customers were demanding from a next generation phone system provider.”

PeerioBiz Small Business system supports more then 30 enterprise grade features usually found in standard PBX. It also includes unlimited free Voice Mail as a standard functionality.