Verizon (News - Alert) has been awarded the 2011 North American Frost & Sullivan Customer Value Enhancement Award. Frost & Sullivan recognized Verizon on the basis of its recent analysis of the VoIP access and SIP trunking market.

Proactive creating of value for its customers by a company is one of the criteria for winning the award. Improving the return on the investment that customers make in its services or products should also be the focus of the company. A company which has demonstrated excellence in implementing strategies for the same is recognized by Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) each year. The company's inordinate focus on enhancing the value that its customers receive is recognized by this award. This results in improved customer retention and customer-base expansion.

According to Elka Popova, Program Director for Frost & Sullivan, Verizon has been able deliver superior value to its business customers due to the company’s significant experience in delivering next-generation services and solutions. The company also has an expansive global network footprint and breadth of partnerships. Apart from the company’s broad voice over Internet protocol or VoIP/ Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) or SIP access services portfolio, Verizon’s unique capabilities like Burstable Enterprise Shared Trunking or BEST and VoIP IP Enterprise Routing or VIPER are instrumental for delivering superior value to the business customers.

In a release, Popova said, "While its services provide considerable benefits to businesses of all sizes, Verizon is particularly well positioned to enable large, multi-site businesses to gain greater value from deploying IP communications services and solutions."

According to Mike Palmer, VP of enterprise strategy and CMO with Verizon, innovative technologies and products are being offered by Verizon for the voice-over-IP customers. This fact has been reinforced by this industry recognition.

Palmer said, "SIP communications is surging in popularity not only for the network and operational efficiencies it delivers, but also for its inherent unified communications platform for hot applications such as video chat, social networking, presence and mobile device support."

A range of next-generation services was launched a decade ago for the first time by Verizon. These included hosted IP Centrex and IP Integrated Access services.