In the hunt for flexibility, mobility, cost savings and untethered workers, corporations are searching for the tools to drive their organizations to the leading edge.

Such services — VoIP, wireless broadband Internet access and full-featured phones, to name a few — comprise integrated solutions that enable employees to work anytime and anyplace.

That can be for a home office worker, a remote teleworker, even road warriors working from a corporate sedan — or an RV.

And companies are responding at a time when telework and remote officing continues to grow in popularity. Telework, or the use of telecommunications to enable employees to work from almost anywhere, is becoming a popular counter to rising real estate costs, worker mobility and fuel prices. HR association WorldatWork reports that the total number of U.S. teleworkers — from employees to contractors and even business owners — has risen 17 percent, from 28.7 million in 2006 to 33.7 million in 2008.

“Mainstreaming telework will enable employers to control costs and provide the foundation for employment stability and future growth,” said Chuck Wilsker, president of The Telework Coalition. The volume of  employer inquiries his organization receives has tripled in the past two years.

At a trade show this week, Verizon unveiled several enhancements to Hosted IP Centrex — its premier “in-the-cloud” voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) service. The service simplifies businesses’ ability to leverage IP networks and applications into effective telework solutions. The company also demonstrated how several of the company’s other products and services enable companies and individuals to take advantage of the transformation to telework.

Among the new enhancements seen in the corporate environment are solutions that make the virtual office a reality for remote workers, and allow businesses to more efficiently establish a local presence. These features include the ability to have calls made from a softphone — a software program using a computer, headset and a broadband Internet connection — appear to originate from the user’s business line; easily register a physical location for E-911 purposes; and to provision local business numbers for teleworkers that are in business markets strategic to an enterprise.

For some companies, such enhancements combine with a wide range of innovative offerings to help organizations employ telework as a strategy to do more with less, enhance workforce mobility and productivity, and achieve environmental objectives — all essential in today’s business climate.

“Whether companies want to reduce real estate costs, improve productivity, increase customer and employee satisfaction or reduce carbon emissions, the tools exist today for businesses to do the job right,” said Blair Crump, group president of worldwide sales for Verizon Business. “By thinking outside of the box – or in this case, the physical office — companies can transform their operations to establish a more global presence, or a more local presence, as their business requires, while controlling costs.”

Solutions unveiled at VoiceCon capitalize on the transformation to telework with minimal capital expense. For example, the Verizon Web Center hosted IP contact center solution enables companies to employ call center agents at home or outside of a traditional centralized call center environment to help control costs while increasing communications flexibility to scale up or down to meet cyclical business requirements or business-continuity objectives.

Its PBX Mobile Extension software application allows individuals to place and receive calls on their wireless phone and use the same advanced office features and functions associated with PBX and key systems. This allows workers to move seamlessly and transparently between their mobile and desk phones to complete a call in progress, conduct quick and secure conference calls, and initiate mass notification enabling companies to quickly respond to planned or unforeseen situations.

The company’s HD videoconferencing and telepresence partners Verizon Business with Cisco, Polycom and TANDBERG to enable advanced visual collaboration for its customers. “The technology and the business climate are ripe for telework,” said Nancy Gofus, senior vice president of global business products for Verizon.