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To: JBH who wrote (67)	6/6/1998 9:03:00 AM
From: mrknowitall	Respond to of 173

re: Tekelec - their only customers for the SS7 products are telco and telco-related companies.

To: JBH who wrote (67)	6/6/1998 11:17:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 173

John, mrknowitall, The world of SS7 and its associated protocols, lexicon, syntax, etc., has, since its inception, been highly esoteric and extremely unattractive to the outside world, since nowhere else was there a nee for it outside of the telecomm common carrier space. One needed to be a heads-down programmer skilled in a relatively complex, or at least different (becuase of its uncommon nature) set of instructions and rules in order to deploy it correctly. Object oriented platforms are changing much of that, but SS7 is not something that the everyday enterprise IT department has had a need to know about (up until this time, in any event). It's only been within the recent past (18 months or so, and most dramatically in the past six months), that non-traditional (non-POTS/AIN) vendors have taken an interest to it, due to the emergence and the growing acceptance of the VoIP model, among other competition-enabled initiatives. The new vendors are comprised of the bigger router and remote access vendors, and an assortment of 3rd party software houses concerned with prepaid billing and other calling card systems, specialized voice [and ISDN multimedia] services and the emerging IP and other packet-based convergence platforms. Some network management software firms writing code which needs to address SS7 matters in connection with Telecommunications Network Management (TMN) dictates are also heavily involved with SS7 at this time. In short, SS7 is on its way of becoming assimilated into the mainstream of knowledge of the forum of new players who have a need to know about it. >>... and Tekelec seems to be gaining respect as one of Cisco's competitors<< It's more like the other way around, when it comes to mastery of the SS7 platform. Tekelec has been one of the few 800-pounders in this realm for the longest time. It is Cisco, Bay, ASND (and not surprisingly, both Sun and Microsoft, who several months ago announced a rash of new SS7 platform initiatives), and others of this ilk, who must work double time in order to do catch-up in this environment. It is very likely that some of the text books that these newcomers are reading were written by Tekelec (and Tandem & Strutus) engineers. Regards, Frank Coluccio