It’s at least a start: RIM (the makers of the Blackberry) have announced an acquisition of Ascendent Systems, a company that makes software for connecting mobile phones to corporate phone systems. This means that companies using Blackberries will be able to basically turn the Blackberry into an extension on their phone system.

I can’t find a ton of technical details, but apparently it supports SIP. It says the cell phones get full functionality of the deskphones, like 4 or 5 digit extension dialing, conferencing, transfers, parking, etc. I wonder how much functionality they’re actually offloading.

Ever since I got involved with open-source telephony and voip, I’ve wanted a way to integrate our cell phones with our PBX at work. Optimally this would mean that the cell phone is simply an extension from the PBX, and the cellular provider is simply taking a SIP connection from my PBX, and connecting it to a cell phone on their network. Likewise, when a number is dialed from the cell phone, it should go back through the PBX, the same way that a deskphone directly wired would do. This would mean that you could have multiple devices on one extension (your deskphone, cell phone, and a software phone on your laptop). There only be one voicemail box, and all commands would be the same no matter what device you used to dial.