In more than 125 cities in 40 countries worldwide, Ernst & Young presents its annual Entrepreneur Of The Year® (EOY) award to the most successful and innovative entrepreneurial business leaders around the globe.

The nomination process begins at the regional level in each country. Regional winners are then eligible for their country’s national Entpreneur Of the Year Award.

Gia McNutt, CEO of SOS, was recently named a winner at the regional or semi-finalist level. Ernst & Young had 60-70 local entrants in SOS's geographic region, and selected about one third as semi-finalists. Next, semi-finalists are interviewed by the judging panel at a semi-finalist's reception in Menlo Park.

Lawrence McNutt, co-founder of SOS and Director of Professional Services, is currently in contention for InfoWorld's CTO 25 Award. As the executive responsible for SOS's technology vision and execution, McNutt is one of the nation’s foremost experts on integrated advanced communications solutions for business.

Founding the company in 1992 with a modest personal investment coupled with huge drive and determination, the McNutts developed SOS into a services organization. They provided solutions to small and midsize businesses that were struggling with complex communications systems, unpredictable IT budgets, costly network downtime, impaired productivity, and lack of real-time business intelligence. SOS has since become a recognized leader in the converged communications arena of IP Telephony, Call Centers, and Unified Messaging.

Lawrence McNutt has personally guided over 70 companies to deploy converged solutions over the past nine years. He has also helped dozens of data integration companies move into converged communications through the partner program he developed in 2001. Projects have ranged from global IP contact centers to 10 person help desks with multimedia routing, custom IVR’s, and CTI integration. His key innovation has been the development of migration strategies from TDM to IP telephony, which has been fundamental to SOS’s success in converged communications. Today, the SOS team has designed and implemented more than 100 state-of-the-art IP telephony solutions, connecting tens of thousands of users in dozens of states.

See Gia's McNutt's article Hot Trends in IP Telephony for 2006 on Rich Tehrani's blog.