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To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (1902)	8/2/1999 10:22:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5853

Hi Scott, thanks for taking the time to elaborate such. I'd like to reply to your points later on today or tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a related article to tide you over... Regards, Frank -------- "How Important Is Open Telecom And Open Source Code?" August 2, 1999 CTI NEWS via NewsEdge Corporation : Proprietary solutions strengthen the bottom line of telecom industry leaders by creating market dominance and solidifying a locked-in customer base. This technological dogma stood unchallenged in the early years of our industry when a few market giants roamed our world without contest. But the earth continues to turn and the times continue to change. Competition initiated by deregulation and fueled by the Internet has altered the telecommunications landscape. An ever- increasing number of competitors, large and small, are consistently faced with the need for interoperability as the movement toward open solutions becomes more established. The open telecommunications movement has gained speed with its distinct time-to-market advantages. Open telecommunications means that developers can take off-the-shelf, compatible components, assemble them, and get them into the hands of solutions providers twice as fast when compared to proprietary solutions. Clearly, as an industry, we have embraced the need for open, common standards. Without SS7, would anyone be able to make a reliable international telephone call today? And without H.323, would the IP telephony market be approaching $1.5 billion by the year 2001? Surprisingly, despite its benefits, the process of ensuring open telecommunications has proven something of a liability. Open telecommunications by definition depends upon the creation of standards. However, the establishment of new communications standards requires time sometimes lots of it. Initiating a new standard often takes years of work and typically requires the participation of at least a dozen industry vendors. Steadily increasing time-to-market pressures heightened as the industry enters the early stages of explosive growth B force us to look for a new model to achieve shortened development time. We only need to look as far as the Internet to spot an emerging trend within the open telecommunications area open source. An open source development model is a distributed one that has evolved from the Internet. Its proven benefits over the traditional commercial development process include: an astonishingly rapid development time; faster bug fixes; and a robust, stable set of software features. An additional advantage to developers is that access to source code increases their control and reduces their concerns about being locked into a closed technology. The benefits of open source have persuaded more telecommunications vendors to leverage this model as a means to drive the rapid growth of solutions for the industry. In our new world, where convergence is the watchword of the day, no company is an island. We must work together to guarantee interoperability. Standards and specifications are still required. Open source, however, provides the opportunity for vendors to deliver actual working code concurrent with the standards process. As an example, at Natural MicroSystems, we recently worked closely with Motorola, Lucent Microelectronics, Ericsson, PICMG and other industry leaders to launch Open Source for Open Telecom (www.opentelecom.org). A global initiative, it is designed to expedite the telecommunications industry's migration to standards-based hardware and software solutions through increased access to working source code via the open source model. This collaborative effort actually arose from Natural MicroSystems' realization that we were the only vendor in the industry to have hot-swap software-enabling technology for the CompactPCI platform. We were involved in a wireless gateway project, which utilized our DSP resource boards with our digital trunk T1/E1 interface. The OEM developer building the gateway needed a frame relay interface, which was ultimately provided by NetAccess. By making our CompactPCI hot-swap source code available, the developer was able to speed delivery of the application to the customer by about 75 percent B an incredible time-to-market advantage by any measure. Importantly, while this helped the vendors involved, it was the customer who derived the ultimate benefit from the open source code model. Through open access to our source code, we have enabled other companies even our competitors B to get CompactPCI-based products to market faster. At the same time, an industry initiative via PICMG is underway to specify software APIs for CompactPCI Hot Swap, making it entirely possible for a specification and working software to be available concurrently. This is especially significant since virtually all of the leading telecommunications equipment manufacturers have CompactPCI projects in the works. Open source telecommunications initiatives today offer a range of capabilities. Efforts underway at Ericsson and Nuance Communications provide excellent examples. Ericsson, one of the early leaders in open telecommunications and open source, has already seen success with its Erlang/OTP, an open source programming language and middleware for building distributed, fault-tolerant telecommunications systems. Nuance recently announced open source for its Foundation SpeechObjects, a set of components enabling the development of speech recognition applications so critical to emerging telecomm applications. Open solutions are a reality of our industry. It's still somewhat early to gauge the overall impact of the open source code model in telecommunications-at-large, though.