Another interesting battle is brewing in the VoIP arena. This was an area where I thought SUNW would dominate because of the need for the enterprise to have 99.999% up time. Voice On The Net (VON) Conference in Seattle runs this week. Sunw has quite a few partners with products that are at the show.
Voice Over IP Means Business
(http://content.techweb.com/tech/e_business/20020411_e_business)
Wednesday, April 10, 2002, 7:49 AM ET.
It's Back To Business for VoIP 2002
By Stuart Glascock
( internetwk.com
From the article:
"...Many VON attendees -- a mix of carriers, equipment vendors, and enterprise customers -- are clearly survivors. Sending delegations were carriers like AT&T, Bell Canada, Korea Telecom, NTT, Sprint, Telus, and Verizon. Also with a large presence were WorldCom, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft, which hosted a Partner Pavilion where it showcased how other firms are exploiting the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) features of Windows XP..."
Eventual demand will be huge! Here is what AT&T is saying:
From the article:
(http://www.internetweek.com/story/INW20020411S0002)
"..."VoIP has not taken off as predicted, but VoIP on the AT&T network has doubled since 1999," Eslambolchi said. "It's very clear that VoIP is going to grow. By 2006, 50 percent of the traffic minutes are going to be in IP, according to IDC. That estimate is probably going to hold." ...".
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It appears that standards are part of the issue and MS XP client software supports SIP. Dodn't know what SUNW is doing but I believe they have developed a platform that utilies J2EE.
SIP :SIP
(1) (Session Initiation Protocol) An IP telephony signaling protocol developed by the IETF. SIP is a text-based protocol that is based on HTTP and MIME, which makes it suitable and very flexible for integrated voice-data applications. SIP is designed for voice transmission, uses fewer resources and is considerably less complex than H.323. Its addressing scheme is URL-like and human readable; for example: sip:john.doe@company.com. SIP relies on the session description protocol (see SDP) for session initiation. Windows XP was the first version of Windows to natively support SIP.
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It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next few years.
EKS |
