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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jack Hartmann who wrote (10223)	1/17/2001 10:09:20 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Hello Jack, You may be interested in perusing the Softswitch Consortium site. softswitch.org

To: Jack Hartmann who wrote (10223)	1/18/2001 6:55:13 PM
From: D. K. G.	Respond to of 12823

Jack, here's another blurp on IpVerse: One to Watch: IpVerse has the soft (switch) touch By Om Malik Redherring.com, January 18, 2001 herring.com This article is from the January 16, 2001, issue of Red Herring magazine. The venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers rarely injects itself into any deal in the third round, but it made an exception in the case of IpVerse. That's just one sign that IpVerse is one of the hottest networking startups around. Why all the buzz around this two-year-old company in Sunnyvale, California? IpVerse makes an operating system that lets service providers deploy cool new applications on the converged network. "If you look at it, the mainframe was usurped by the personal computer, and the same thing is happening in the telecom space, where the telecom switch is being disaggregated," says Paul Singh, an IpVerse cofounder. Just as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) built the OS for the PC, IpVerse has built the OS for the new telecom universe. It's called a "soft switch," and it's a market that the consultancy The Yankee Group expects to grow from $104 million in 1999 to $4.3 billion by 2004. SOFT SERVICE Soft switches are getting attention because they give service providers a cheap, easy way to add new applications like call waiting and call forwarding to their data-cum-voice networks. And the software can be updated on a small computer that sits quietly in a corner. This differs dramatically from the usual voice networks, where most switching has been done on dedicated hardware built by the likes of Nortel Networks (NYSE: NT) and Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU). Such hardware costs 50 to 60 percent more than soft switches, and it has trouble handling new services like videoconferencing. The idea for IpVerse came to Mr. Singh and cofounders Gursharan Sidhu and Vijay Nadkarni in 1998 when they saw huge changes in the telecom infrastructure. They started IpVerse with a $3 million investment from Norwest Venture Partners. Since then, the company has raised $39 million more from Kleiner Perkins, Battery Ventures, and Norwest. "In those days, everyone was focused on the hardware side of things, and we decided to go the software route because we saw that there is only so much hardware could do for the new converged network," recalls Mr. Singh. The company has signed on important customers like Telocity (Nasdaq: TLCT) and Electric Lightwave (Nasdaq: ELIX). It seems only a matter of time before the rest of the world gets to know IpVerse.