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To: Jurgen who wrote (35781)	2/21/1998 10:43:00 PM
From: Jeff Jordan	Respond to of 61433

February 23, 1998 Lucent Vice President Karyn Mashima on her company's future in data By Mike Vizard InfoWorld Electric As the worlds of data and voice communications collide, vendors from each background are trying to break into each other's territory. Approaching this convergence from the voice side is Lucent Technologies. Karyn Mashima, vice president of Lucent's Enterprise Group, sat down with InfoWorld Executive News Editor Mike Vizard to give voice to the company's data plans. InfoWorld: What is driving the trend for voice equipment vendors to move into data? Mashima: I think that there are a couple of things. One is that when you look at voice networks and data networks, they're both evolving very, very rapidly. And the customers are feeling that it's very difficult to keep up. At the same time, customers want applications with much greater integration of voice and data than we've had previously. A perfect example is Internet Call Centers, where customers are wanting to be able to browse the Web and be able to just point and click and be talking over the Web to an agent that would see the same screen as them. InfoWorld: Is there anything driving down the cost of these technologies? Mashima: Yes. What we've done is just taken a PC server that we call an Internet Telephony Gateway, and this connects with the call centers that customers already have. So what the Gateway does is the [public switched telephone network]-to-IP conversion. In this way, you can start merging the worlds at a very low level. InfoWorld: What types of users are looking at voice over IP? Mashima: We're seeing a lot of interest in voice over IP in two instances. One is in the very aggressive ISPs that are actually wanting to compete with their telephony counterparts. The second one is if you look at corporations that have intranets. [Corporate users] are finding that if they use Internet telephony to provide their voice calls, there's a significant reduction in telephony costs. InfoWorld: What will be the "killer applications" for integrated voice and data networks? Mashima: I can see Internet Call Centers, I think maybe workflow, but other than that, I think that [Microsoft's] NetMeeting is going to play a major piece in it because it's free, it's on everybody's desktop and sort of intrigues people to want to start using their PC as their phone. InfoWorld: You recently completed the acquisition of Gigabit Ethernet vendor Prominet. What does this company bring to Lucent? Mashima: Primarily, what we had in the past has been an ATM-centric solution, with the exception of a 10/100 [Ethernet] switch out of Agile. And now with Prominet we are able to work in the frame-centric [Gigabit Ethernet] world. We want to be able to do a lot more voice over Gigabit Ethernet, as well as regular Gigabit Ethernet. InfoWorld: What's the status of the relationship between Lucent and Bay Networks? Mashima: We want to ensure we maintain a very strong partnership with Bay. What we have is many piece products now, either homegrown or through acquisition, but we believe that Bay still has a far more robust overall portfolio. InfoWorld: So if I pick Lucent for my voice-data solution, I'm getting elements of Agile, Prominet, and Bay, packaged with some homegrown Lucent technology? Mashima: It depends on the application. Some applications would require only Lucent products. So we will look at the application the customer is trying to deploy and make sure that we have the right product set for it.