I was just at the Rhetorex homepage (Rhetorex is the wholly owned subsidary of OCtel). "Rhetorex, Inc. was founded in March, 1988 with the specific goal of becoming the voice processing industry leader in the design, development, manufacturing and marketing of microcomputer-based Digital Signal Processing (DSP) ..."
Three years ago, Rhetorex had a possibility of fulfilling that goal, as they were then seen as the industry leader. Since then, however, most of the top talent has left, and ther have been no innivative products comming from the company. In three years, Rhetorex has surrendered its lead to Dialogic. Dialogic has established SC-Bus as the HW and SW stantard for resource switching. Now, S-100 (AKA CT-Media), the Dialogic led initiative has become the standard for telephony resource abstrction, and Rhetorex will have to support S-100 (it has not announced any plans to do so) in order to remain competitive. Note that S-100, in theory, will allow applications to run using a variety of vendor's products. Previously, it was very difficult to move from one telephony platform to another.
It is interesting that the company that has become the leader of CT has done so, not by establishing proprietary standards, but by leading the effort for open standards.
Rhetorex has failed in its mission to become "the voice processing industry leader". Dialogic rightfully owns that title. They will soon be shipping a PCI-based quad T1 board (Dm3). In one PC card, they will have the same port capacity as 5 Rhetorex boards (it takes 3 32-port voice boards, and 2 dual T1 interface cards for 5 Rhetorex T1 spans). Not to mention that the Rhetorex boards are crippled by the ISA bus, while the Dialogic Dm3 boards run on PCI.
It is a safe guess that Octel products (current and future) will use Rhetorex boards. The appearent unwillingness of Rhetorex to adapt open standards (S100) may also speak volumes, as Rhetorex is owned by Octel. |
