The company once known as Huges Software, which was absorbed into Flextronics, has spun off as of today to form Arcient, a developer of end-to-end communications software solutions, based in Palo Alto, California. Their list of current partners reads like a who's who of enterprise communications vendors: Cisco, Alcatel, Lucent, Nortel, NEC and Texas Instruments, among others. But why on earth should you care? "If you look at an IT department, when they buy a desktop or laptop they go to Dell but the software comes from Microsoft," Arcient's CEO Ash Bhardwaj told FierceEnterprise. "We want to be the Microsoft of that software." While it's true that most IT departments don't pay attention to who supplies the software for their phone systems, that may change, as communications systems become increasingly complex and as performance and feature sets become more software-dependent. "With the complexity increasing and software solving more problems, the IT buyer will care what's inside," Bhardwaj said. If he's right, you might find yourself looking for an "Arcient inside" sticker the next time you update your phone system.

For more on Arcient:
- check out their website