Being SIP-based, the company’s so-called Session software is designed to give companies a low-cost, scalable way to communicate.

The new subscription packages enable point-to-point and point-to-multipoint voice, instant messaging, video and data communication and conferencing.

While this is still very much an emerging market, COO Bob Randall said Wave Three has differentiated itself from heavyweight rivals such as Microsoft Corp and WebEx Communications.

Wave Three’s products are Web-based tools that compete with the Microsoft Office Live Communication Server, which enables users to share instant messaging and presence-awareness applications.

But unlike Microsoft LCS, Wave Three’s products are compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems, according to Randall.

By pulling the capability out of the operating system, you can be at the application level and be a lot more flexible, he said.

San Diego, California-based Wave Three now also competes head-to-head with WebEx, which sells similar hosted services.

While WebEx also offers SIP-based compatibility, Randall said Wave Three’s audio-video products are more feature rich because they are entirely IP-based and do not run through the traditional public switched telephone network, or PSTN.

Still, most enterprises currently rely on traditional PSTN telephony rather than IP-based, or VoIP, calling.

However, Randall said that being IP-based, Wave Three offers lower-cost audio and video conferencing than other services that use a PSTN component. In other words, Wave Three users don’t incur a cost to connect to the PSTN and they do not pay by the minute for access to any service.

The company is charging a flat monthly fee of $14.85 per seat for its audio-video hosted service, and $24.95 each video conferencing and data collaboration service.

Randall said that compares to a single hour-long video conferencing session between four users that would cost between $100 and $200.

Wave Three rates are lowered when users subscribe to the entire suit or for multiple users.

Whether this is enough to gain market traction remains to be seen. Since it launched it Session products, Wave Three has garnered about 100 customers, with just two large accounts among them, the University of Southern California and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Randall said the company would sign a few large enterprise customers by year’s end.

I’m seeing a very large growing demand, but it still very much in its infancy in total market penetration, he said. We want to be a leader in offering and deploying a very aggressively priced and efficiently delivered hosted service.

The company has channel partners in Asia, India and Europe.