After a week of balmy weather, palm trees and a lot of Miami heat, more than 8,000 ITEXPO (News - Alert) East 2012 participants headed back to their home states – albeit with some cool trade show loot, new business deals and great stories from the show party at Mangos.

One company that was certainly enjoying the Miami sunshine a few weeks ago was SIP phones provider Panasonic, whose booth was a hotspot as the company demoed its KX-UT670 Smart Desk Phone (News - Alert), an open-sourced based operating system desk phone that was designed to allow users to develop integrated solutions for business communications and operations.

“ITEXPO was a great experience this year,” Kim Murtagh, product manager of SIP Endpoints for Panasonic (News - Alert), told TMCnet. “The exhibit hall was very busy and the Panasonic booth welcomed many attendees.  We were excited to have them see the many communications solutions that we are currently offering, including our new KX-UT670 Smart Desk Phone, and ones that we will be introducing in the near future.  We were also happy to be represented at the show in so many different ways.  Panasonic was in a total of six booths, which included our own those of distribution partners and service providers.”

Panasonic had been basking in the warm glow long before ITEXPO, as in January, the company unveiled the KX-UT670 which expands upon Panasonic’s current lineup of SIP UT Series telephones. The KX -UT670 boasts a full operating, open source system as well as a Web browser, seven-inch color LCD Touch screen and HD wideband voice and high quality HD video. It is certified for Broadsoft, Asterisk (News - Alert) and Metaswitch; can be expandable to six SIP terminals; and has the ability to support Bluetooth.

In addition to shedding light on its latest innovation, one of the highlights of ITEXPO – the world’s largest communications conference – was the show floor, according to Panasonic.

“The show floor is always a highlight for us,” Murtagh said. “Not only does Panasonic get the chance to show off our award-winning products and business solutions and connect with our customers directly, but we are also able to see the emerging technologies from other companies.  This year, the panel discussions were quite interesting especially with a large interest on cloud.”

What was also interesting this year, according to Murtagh, were the key choice phrases that were thrown around in the panels and on the expo floor during this year’s conference —like applications, integration, unified communications, cloud and hosted environments –forecast where the industry is headed.

For those that did get to visit Panasonic at its booth at ITEXPO, the SIP End Points enabler hopes one message came across loud and clear about the company – that it continues to have an unwavering commitment to bringing innovation to the SIP market. “Since June of 2010, we have grown our line-up of SIP telephones tremendously,” Murtagh said. “Specifically, at ITEXPO we were able to showcase 12 SIP phone models, which included a sneak peak of our DECT multi-cell unit launching later this year and also our newest SIP UT670 Smart Desk Phone, which was honored with a 2011 Internet Telephony (News - Alert) Product of the Year Award.  We have plans to continue to create phones designed specifically for the hosted and open source market with enhanced features to provide end-to-end solutions for businesses.”