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Posted: 05/15/2001
Enterprise
Services and Applications
ENTERPRISING
SOLUTIONS
CUSTOMERS RECEIVE NEW IP VOICE HARDWARE, APPLICATIONS
WARMLY
IP voice hardware and
applications have found friendly territory in enterprises. They
already have the data networks that are the infrastructure basis of
converged voice-and-data IP networks, but they also need the
enhanced services that become possible only with IP voice.
So, enterprises are willing to
pay for solutions that make it easier for them to do business, while
consumers keep a tighter rein on their pocketbooks.
Consequently, much of the IP
voice action is taking place with enterprises. Several research
reports released this year have documented the growing interest in
IP PBX, coupled with a willingness to put voice and data on company
LANs. Jason Roberts, product manager for Sphere Communications Inc.
(http://www.spherecom.com/),
which makes an IP PBX, says that most of his enterprise customers
are looking to do a converged solution of voice and data on LANs.
"Most locations [of a company] have data connections, so it's easy
to put IP voice on top of that," he says.
Business users
enthusiastically receive services such as unified messaging,
find-me/follow-me and portable PBX. "We've found that end-user
customers are attracted to the experience of using a single phone to
perform numerous functions, and to have that multifunction phone
available to them regardless of where they are," says Houman
Modarres, director of IP telephony for CommWorks Corp. (http://www.commworks.com/).
"Service providers have discovered that subscriber usage increased
sequentially as new services were added."
CENTREX, PBX
CommWorks, a 3Com Corp. (http://www.3com.com/) company,
demonstrated its SIP IP Centrex solution at the Voice on the Net
(VON) show in March. The solution delivers standard business-phone
features such as call hold, call transfer, last-number look-up and
redial, call forward, and three-way, as well as enhanced features,
such as unified messaging.
With each extension converted
to an IP address and the phone features implemented as applications
in the network, users can access all the features on their desk
phones through the Internet when they are on the road, via a soft
phone for PCs.
The CommWorks Centrex supports
intelligent end devices, such as SIP phones, personal digital
assistants (PDAs) and SIP client proxy servers. The CommWorks IP
Centrex package includes the Total Control 1000 Media Gateway, with
T1/E1 trunk lines; the 4220 SIP Proxy Server; and a series of
back-end servers for accounting, directory mapping, billing support
and authentication.
"For the deployment of
IP-based Centrex services to be successful, service providers need
to give customers more than what they have today," Modarres says.
"One way to do this is to move beyond basic Centrex service
offerings and add new enhanced services, such as unified
messaging."
Also at VON, the company
launched the CommWorks Compatible program for IP telephony vendors.
This program centers on interworking and mediation between IP
telephony products, "which we view as essential to the widespread
deployment and acceptance of IP telephony," Modarres says.
Sphere provides the Sphericall
IP PBX, a product that has received high ratings from recognized
testing entities, such as Mier Communications Inc. (http://www.mier.com/). At VON, the
company announced support for media gateway control protocol (MGCP),
so the product now can talk to IP or analog endpoints, and can
operate over IP or ATM networks.
The Spherical product gives
flexibility in the architecture of the network, says Roberts. "There
is a customer premises box, but the network is distributed, so you
can put call control and gateways at any point in the network. This
is different from 'IP-enabled' products because we don't have a
chassis, and service providers can place components where they want
to," says Roberts. "You can put gateways at customer premises, but
keep all the call control at the service provider."
The PBX product includes
standard CLASS features, unified messaging and voice mail. There is
also a client application for each user's desktop that provides call
control over the phone set on the desk.
Sphere has moved from a
proprietary signaling system to MGCP. The company now is evaluating
a SIP stack, which it plans to add to the system by the end of the
year.
"We did MGCP first because it
is similar to what our proprietary signaling was like," says
Roberts. "Plus, phones are actually out there from companies such as
Polycom Inc. [http://www.polycom.com/], and you
can get them today. But SIP is definitely the next step."
One benefit of the new
technology, Roberts says, is that as the line between CPE and
service provider equipment blurs, so does the marketplace between
enterprise and service provider equipment.
"Our product today scales to
15,000 users, so it could easily scale and fit in a central office
and play a Centrex role," he says. One customer, the City of
Oceanside, Calif., "is like a service provider because the equipment
is centrally located and serves all their offices."
Overall for vendors of IP
technology, Roberts says, "The whole SIP discussion is much more
fascinating because it looks like there are real applications now,
and people are starting to talk about the use of the technology, not
just the technology itself."
For MGCP, "Polycom is now
announcing MGCP phones. Cisco's [Cisco Systems Inc., http://www.cisco.com/] are not out,
but they have it. Sometimes it takes a back seat to SIP, but we are
seeing applications of it," Roberts says.
IN CONFERENCE
Judging by the number of new
implementations, IP conferencing will be one of the most popular
applications that next-generation service providers deliver to their
enterprise customers. At least three of the leading application
platform providers--BroadSoft Inc. (http://www.broadsoft.com/),
dynamicsoft Inc. (http://www.dynamicsoft.com/)
and IPeria Inc. (http://www.iperia.com/)--implemented
the Voyant Technologies Inc. (http://www.voyanttech.com/)
SIP conferencing server into their platforms for demonstrations at
VON.
LongBoard Inc. (http://www.longboardinc.com/),
whose pro- ducts offer softswitch and application platform features,
also demonstrated the ability to work with Voyant.
"Voyant has a history in
conferencing," says Richard Connaughton, president, CEO and director
of IPeria. "And they are a good-sized company. They have architected
IP-based conferencing, and a number of carriers are interested in a
joint solution of us and them."
Voyant was the first to have a
commercially available business voice messaging application using
the scripting language VoiceXML, Connaughton says, explaining, "The
significance of integrating VoiceXML is that it allows you to
develop applications very quickly. Our goal is to have third parties
develop applications on our platform, such as for vertical
markets."
The Voyant product offers a
service it calls IP Instant Conferencing, in which a conference can
be initiated without a reservation. The application uses presence
information to locate and connect the parties, and it can reach a
broad range of end devices, including mobile phones, laptops and
PDAs.
A new entrant in conferencing
at VON is Octave Communications Inc. (http://www.octavecomm.com/),
which supplies conference bridges, the hardware that provides ports
for conference calls. The company's products support IP and TDM
calls, and conferencing can be managed through a web interface.
Octave also has added voice recognition capability recently to its
platform. Octave has a $20 million two-year contract with British
Telecommunications plc (http://www.bt.com/).
Demonstrating web conferencing
was iTelco Communications Inc., known as eTouch (http://www.etouch.com/), a
communications ASP. The web conferencing also includes private text
chat during conference calls and file-sharing.
Artesyn Communication Products
LLC (http://www.artesyncp.com/), a
subsidiary of Artesyn Technologies and a supplier of modular
communication boards and software for telephony applications,
announced a new teleconferencing solution that offers up to 240
voice streams, with the ability to rebroadcast a mixed voice stream
back to conference participants. The product also has a common
object request broker architecture (CORBA) interface for billing and
management systems.
SMART IADS
Clarent Corp. broadened its
product focus to local-loop access with the OpenAccess product line,
a complete converged services solution, including softswitch, IADs
and trunking for services to residential and small to medium-sized
businesses customers.
The line includes several
different IADs, called customer premises gateways (CPGs), which
provide converged voice and data services to businesses over DSL,
cable modem or Ethernet local access.
Clarent has implemented H.323
and MGCP on the IADs, "but SIP is emerging quickly, and work
continues on activating it," says Mark McIlvane, executive vice
president. "It is in the product plan because we are starting to see
a lot of SIP phones, certainly on the enterprise side, and we are
going to need SIP phones and [customer premises] gateways. We are
looking at the release of full SIP products in the second or third
quarter."
Clarent is promoting
application development with its Star Partners program, with more
than 40 companies currently enrolled to write applications, "and we
expect that will grow to hundreds over the next year because that is
a drive for this company," McIlvane says. "I was in intelligent
networking ... and many things were tried that never were
successful, mostly because of problems with control by the end user.
Now we can have web control. If a company has a conference call, for
example, they can ask for the special service, then remove it. Or,
you can click a few icons while on the road and redirect your
messages."
McIlvane sees IP voice
becoming dominant. "At first I thought, 'This is great technology,
but it will never replace the PSTN.' Now I think it will totally
replace it. And it costs less. It is really an Oracle [Inc., http://www.oracle.com/] database
with a very powerful computer. You don't need a special protocol,
such as $2 million for an SS7 database."
NEC Electronics Inc. (http://www.necel.com/) and
VoicePump Inc. (http://www.voicepump.com/) have
collaborated on an IAD reference design for VoDSL applications. The
design will support rapid developments of DSL IADs, as well as DSL
bridging and routing modems for multitenant offices, apartment
buildings and residential developments. The reference design
combines an NEC network controller chip and software with
VoicePump's digital signal processing (DSP) hardware, software and
mixed-signal technologies.
GATEWAYS
Gateways scaled down to the
needs of enterprises made appearances in several booths at VON,
reflecting the increasing interest in enterprises in converged voice
and data, and use of their data networks to reduce phone
costs.
Arelnet Ltd. (http://www.arelnet.com/)
introduced the i-Tone MiniPrime gateway, an addition to its i-Tone
line aimed at enterprises and MDUs/MTUs. The MiniPrime is a small,
self-contained version of the i-Tone Prime gateway and integrates
with the i-Tone Primo access gateway for small and medium-sized
enterprises and the i-Tone Gatekeeper to create an end-to-end VoIP
system. The unit has one or two E1/T1 connections in a small desktop
unit and delivers up to 60 simultaneous voice and fax calls. It
supports all standard VoIP codecs, and H.323 and MGCP.
HelloSoft.com (http://www.hellosoft.com/),
which has historically provided speech coders, networking protocols
and algorithms, has entered the gateway market with a new product
for corporate use. Called HelloVoice, the gateway enables companies
to connect their PBXs directly to the Internet via Ethernet,
enabling VoIP calling to branch offices or anyone else with an IP
address. CW
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