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To: Phil Jacobson who wrote (9101)	11/5/2000 8:03:16 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Re: Optical Software Hi Phil, My question is what public companies are positioned to take advantage of this potential next shift in priority? Great question, and one which is on a lot of our collective minds. While not a recommendation, a good starting point is to look at the ODSI initiatives as proposed by SCMR and then try to sort out why ODSI didn't fly with the OIF crowd, led by CSCO and CIEN. lightreading.com There are numerous other on-topic articles at LightReading, and plenty of URLs to follow up with. One of the Holy Grails of the optical software game is provisioning. In essence, in days gone by, a customer would call its telephony service provider and request added capacity. Provisioning this in increments of T-1/E-1 or similar granularity could oftentimes take months, as new cable and equipment were installed. The concept for today's version of provisioning is to do it all (or almost all) in software and reduce the time to supply new capacity to a customer to minutes instead of months. Enron is very keen on this and finds that the idea is very complimentary with its commodity market approach to bandwidth provisioning. Additionally, you might want to take a look at Operation: Interoptical oni.com This is a consortium of 7 vendors who are trying to create a seamless end-to-end solution for the corporate IT department. I remember them as the ABCJOST club. HTH, Ray :)

To: Phil Jacobson who wrote (9101)	11/5/2000 8:19:46 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

I'd have to give that some thought. What strikes me, though, is the apparent conflict in some circles that such a pursuit would entail. Half the world is trying to make their networks stupider, and the other half, smarter. The two or more, depending on how many flavors of smart you come up with, are not fungible to one another, hence creating even greater divides between the various flavors of bandwidth "pools." In the end, this reduces the level of what is commonly called bandwidth's move to "commodity" status. When the author in your referenced article lists Sigma and SS8 he is not pointing to something that is uniquely optical. These are companies who have done Operations Support System (OSS) products for legacy networks, as well as new development for next gens. Others who would make it to your list are among those who historically had a stake in making networks smarter (and paying for themselves when such was fashionable). These traditional OSS vendors are the SS7 types, the ones who do local number portability, inter-company billing, the accounting shops, network management software vendors, subscriber databasing, enhanced services (AIN/IN), etc. Ultimately, however, I think that new developments in optics, and new wavelength routing algorithms (used to effect bypasses) will overshadow any enhancements that can be made to today's fundamental models, if we are truly speaking about optics. And these, in turn, will require yet additional, more optically-oriented variants, of OSSes. And as in any other paradigm, the management and OSS products that are necessary to run those new networks will lag by some measure, until some time has lapsed after the physical and link layers prove in, beyond concept. But legacy has a way of not going away. They will be tweaking today's primarily-SONETized model (run what protocols you may, they still package them in SONET containers for the most part) for some time to come. Beyond the optics stage you still must deal with the user oriented "services" that must be managed and groomed. And billed for. The following article covers some of these while listing a slew of players in this space, and suggests that there is a trend to placing these platforms in ASPs as opposed to housing them in central offices and ISP pops. teleknowledge.com Thanks for bringing this topic to the board.

To: Phil Jacobson who wrote (9101)	1/17/2001 9:43:42 PM
From: Jack Hartmann	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

It's Going to Be an ipVerse Universe by Jon Hegranes January 17, 2001 GMT Switches didn’t always use to be soft. There are the ones your dads made you go yank off a tree before beating time, and then there are the ones that Nortel and Lucent make. Thanks to a group of innovative and contrarian entrepreneurs, however, soft switches built by ipVerse are the new buzz and they’re stealing the thunder away from typical IPO favorites. Three years ago, ipVerse co-founders Gursharan Sidhu and Vijay Nadkarni noticed the telecom infrastructure revolution, but went a different direction. ipVerse focused in on what software could do for converged networks instead of hardware, and the result has been $42m in financing from some of the biggest VCs on the planet. Dedicated hardware, on which most of today’s switching is done, costs upwards of 50% more than soft switching. Besides the cost savings, soft switching can handle today’s newest applications, like video, far better than hardware can. ipVerse's main product - ControlSwitch, which acts as an operating system - easily adapts into existing networks with its open, multi-protocol call control system. It also has simple web-based tools, where SIP and XML interfaces make service providers job a pleasure because of the ease that new voice, data, etc. applications can be developed and deployed. Great technology alone will not get typical first-round-only VCs pounding down your door during the third round. The reason ipVerse has accomplished this feat is because so many companies are already flocking towards its products. ipVerse has alliances with such goliaths as Cisco [CSCO: Nasdaq] and Sun Microsystems [SUNW: Nasdaq], as well as many other upcoming telecom giants. More importantly, however, ipVerse has paying customers, including Electric Lightwave [ELIX: Nasdaq], Teleocity [TLCT: Nasdaq], and Tuesday signed a deal with Illuminent [ILUM: Nasdaq] where ipVerse’s ControlSwitch will be used throughout Illuminent’s North American network. We expect more and more telecoms to jump onboard the ipVerse universe basically because there isn’t much stopping companies from saving money and improving productivity. This means an IPO shouldn’t be too far down the road, but profitability will have to be within reach. streetadvisor.com Not heard of the soft switch before. Jack