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Technology Stocks : Voice-on-the-net (VON), VoIP, Internet (IP) Telephony -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stephen B. Temple who wrote (2219)	12/19/1998 1:35:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3178

The iNOW! [VoIP Interoperability Now!] Joint Press Release [note: the exclamation mark is part of the title... I would not be putting it there myself at this point, seen a lot of joint announcements like this one in the past six months... maybe this one has some meat on it? Let's wait and see...] Ascend, Cisco, Clarent, Dialogic, Natural MicroSystems and Siemens Join ITXC, Lucent and VocalTec in Support of iNOW! Interoperability Initiative Business Wire - December 17, 1998 06:16 PRINCETON and MURRAY HILL, N.J. and HERZLIYA, Israel--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 17, 1998--ITXC Corp, Lucent Technologies and VocalTec Communications (Nasdaq: VOCLF) today announced that six additional companies will support the upcoming iNOW!(TM) ("interoperability NOW!") Profile scheduled to be published in January. iNOW! is a standards-based, multi-vendor initiative established to quickly provide interoperability among IP telephony platforms. Ascend, Cisco, Clarent, Dialogic, Natural MicroSystems and Siemens will be working with the iNOW! Profile to make their gateways and gatekeepers interoperable with each other's products and with those from Lucent and VocalTec. The industry has come a long way in a year with interoperability now at the top of the agenda for customers and vendors. At this fall's Voice on the Net Conference, ITXC, Lucent and VocalTec demonstrated interoperability among their IP telephony platforms marking the first such accomplishment in the industry. Interoperable Lucent and VocalTec gateways are now deployed on ITXC's commercial network. And most importantly, gateway to gateway interoperability is now commercially available with the release of the VocalTec Ensemble Architecture(TM) and Lucent's PacketStar(TM) Internet Telephony System (ITS) version 2.2. Understanding that customers need interoperability, Ascend, Cisco, Clarent, Dialogic, Natural MicroSystems and Siemens also announced today that they will be supporting iNOW! interoperability in their future products. (See Addendum for quotes) The iNOW! Interoperability Profile will detail how to achieve interoperability between gateways from different vendors and interoperability between gatekeepers from different vendors. Up until recently, carriers and callers were limited in the destinations they could reach since calls had to be terminated on the exact same platform from which they originated. Internet telephony service providers had to choose between dependence on a single vendor or operating multiple parallel networks of incompatible gateways. Tom Caldwell, VP of Carrier Services Marketing and Product Management at Bell Atlantic stated that "Bell Atlantic applauds the companies that have agreed to support the Lucent and VocalTec interoperability. In order to see significant growth of IP telephony in 1999, the industry must commit to certification and demonstration of interoperability early in the year. We believe that interoperability is a key component of a full fledged 'Carrier Class' IP telephony system, therefore a key requirement of Bell Atlantic's suppliers." ITXC Comunicacoes Ltda. was established in July 1998 and deployed its first site one month later, in Sao Paulo Brazil. Its managing officer, Claudio Collado Riechelmann, added today, "The net of this key industry move taken by IP telephony vendors is to allow the homogeneous and solid growth of the ITXC Ltda. footprint in South America. This gives our customers the opportunity to choose whichever platform they feel satisfies their telephony needs for much more affordable prices and future enhanced services." "Many companies have announced interoperability, but Lucent and VocalTec are the first to actually do it. They are to be applauded," said Jeff Pulver, President of pulver.com. "ITXC's leadership in promoting this idea to other major industry vendors is a coup to all involved." Lucent and VocalTec are responsible for the development of the programming and engineering for the iNow! Interoperability Profile. ITXC wrote the marketing requirements, provided project management, and has provided lab and field testing as part of the interoperability effort. VocalTec, ITXC and Lucent together wrote the interoperability guidelines based on the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) H.323 standard, and the upcoming H.225.0 Annex G standard. Tom Evslin, Chairman and CEO of ITXC Corp commented, "It is gratifying to see that each of these companies has chosen industry growth and interoperability over the short term advantage of proprietary implementations. This is a great holiday gift to the IP telephony industry and its customers." "By joining this initiative, these six leading companies are affirming the strength of the iNow! Interoperability Profile being developed by VocalTec, Lucent and ITXC," said Dr. Elon Ganor, Chairman at VocalTec Communications. "VocalTec has been at the forefront of the industry standards effort since the beginning of the IP telephony industry. We are bringing to market interoperable end-to-end IP telephony solutions that support the broad range of services that carrier and corporate customers need." "We are delighted to see the commitment to IP telephony interoperability from other leading vendors," said Chris Schoettle, Vice President of IP Communications, Lucent Technologies. "The leadership Lucent, VocalTec and ITXC have shown in developing the industry's first interoperable IP telephony products and industry's first IP telephony guidelines is proof that customers need interoperability now." About Lucent Technologies: Lucent Technologies designs, builds and delivers a wide range of public and private networks, communications systems and software, data networking systems, business telephone systems and microelectronics components. Bell Labs is the research and development arm for the company. More information about Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, NJ, is available on its Web site at lucent.com. Additional information about Lucent's PacketStar ITS is available at lucent.com. About VocalTec Communications: VocalTec Communications' software enables audio, video, data, text and collaborative communications between personal computers and other devices over IP networks. VocalTec is a leader in developing innovative, open standards products that bridge IP networks and the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) and drive the convergence of computing and telephone technologies. VocalTec owns a minority equity interest in ITXC. More information about VocalTec Communications, headquartered in Herzliya, Israel, is available on its Web site at vocaltec.com. For more information on the VocalTec Ensemble Architecture(tm), please visit vocaltec.com. About ITXC Corp: ITXC is a wholesale provider of services to companies originating and terminating IP calls. Its WWeXchange Service provides wholesale call completion and settlement to anywhere using both Internet telephony and traditional PSTN. Its customers are prepaid calling card and call back companies, traditional carriers, ISPs and new Internet telephony service providers (ITSPs) all of whom use Internet telephony to reduce the cost of international calling. The company operates the most extensive wholesale network of affiliated Internet telephony gateways in the world. www.itxc.com. ITXC(tm) and WWeXchange(SM) are trademarks and service marks of ITXC Corp PacketStar(tm) is a trademark of Lucent Technologies. VocalTec(R) and VocalTec Ensemble Architecture(tm) are trademarks or registered trademarks of VocalTec Communications Ltd. Other trademarks mentioned belong to their respective companies. Certain statements contained in this release may contain forward-looking information with respect to plans, projections or future performance of VocalTec Communications, the occurrence of which involves certain risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, product and market acceptance risks, the impact of competitive pricing, competitive products, product development, commercialization and technological difficulties and other risks detailed in the Company's reports filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Addendum Comments from supporting vendors Ascend "Interoperability between gateway vendors is a must to create truly global IP voice networks," said Roger Boyce, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Networking Division, Ascend Communications, Inc. "By participating in iNOW! Ascend is helping shape innovative solutions, like voice over IP, that run on our next generation networks." Cisco "Open Standards and vendor interoperability are critical to the success of packet telephony," said Alistair Woodman, Product Line Manager for packet telephony applications at Cisco Systems. "We are pleased to be working with other industry leaders to ensure wide acceptance of standards which will accelerate the rapid transition to New World networks and services." Clarent "Clarent's carrier customers are currently carrying millions of minutes of IP telephony traffic per month and are expecting interoperability so that they can expand the reaches of their networks," said Jerry Chang, President and Co-Founder of Clarent Corporation. "We endorse interoperability efforts like the iNOW! initiative because such efforts will grow the deployment of IP telephony across the globe." Dialogic "Dialogic has been driving IP telephony standards from the industry's inception and is pleased to support this standards-based interoperability initiative," said Larry Fromm, Vice President of New Business Development, Dialogic Corporation. "This move enables our IP telephony customer base to take advantage of opportunities emerging from the global ITXC network." Natural MicroSystems "Natural MicroSystems' products are at the heart of many of today's leading IP telephony systems, including those from Lucent and Clarent," said Joel Hughes, Director of IP Telephony for Natural MicroSystems. "Our support of the iNOW! interoperability initiative will enable our customers to create and sell platforms that can seamlessly operate in any iNOW! compliant network worldwide, such as the ITXC network." Siemens "Siemens applauds ITXC's interoperability initiatives," said Chuck Harris, Vice President and General Manager of Internet Solutions for Siemens Information and Communication Networks. "We look forward to continuing these efforts with ITXC, as we work together to develop industry standards for IP telephony, while leveraging Siemens' global presence and carrier grade VoIP platform, the InterXpress." CONTACT: Stephen Loudermilk Lucent Technologies 1.908.953.7514 (office) 1.800.759.8888, pin 1277163 (pager) sloudermilk@lucent.com www.lucent.com or Mary Evslin ITXC Corp 1.609.419.1500, ext. 102 mevslin@itxc.com www.itxc.com or Jo Lee VocalTec Communications 1.201.768.9400, ext. 211 jo_lee@vocaltec.com www.vocaltec.com or Marty Querzoli/Theresa Edo LNS Communications (for VocalTec) 1.617.577.9777 tedo@lnscom.com mquerzoli@lnscom.com

To: Stephen B. Temple who wrote (2219)	12/26/1998 5:20:00 PM
From: Stephen B. Temple	Respond to of 3178

The fine art of device integration Network World: Key announcements lately are underscoring the convergence of telephony with data, and just about everyone is getting into the act. Access vendors such as Cisco and Ascend have been pursuing telephony integration initiatives for some time, and now smaller companies with mass-market customer premises equipment (CPE) are jumping into the game. At the recent Western Cable show, various announcements and technology demonstrations showed how cable providers are going to put packet-telephony features into access devices. For example, Broadcom announced a new chipset that combines cable modem capabilities with IP telephony and videoconferencing functions. Broadcom supplies chips to many of the leading cable modem and set-top box providers. Motorola demonstrated a voice-over-IP-capable cable modem, and is teaming with Netspeak to bring IP telephony across all of Motorola's access platforms. The cable vendors are talking about selling these $200 devices with almost no markup. Digital subscriber line (DSL) vendors are getting into the act, too. Expect to see a slew of DSL modems and routers soon with IP telephony inside and RJ-11 ports on the outside. JetStream has just announced ATM-based Integrated Access Devices that reside at subscriber premises. These boxes connect to a DSL circuit and provide integrated local telephone connectivity and Internet service via an Ethernet connection. Other such products are coming shortly. In addition, some preliminary announcements from Sprint and MCI WorldCom indicate these carriers are going to use those devices in ION and OnNet, respectively. Is the network ready for this sort of integration, and will business users trust their voice applications, including mission-critical ones, to such centralized products and services? Our response: Why not? You see, many of these packet- and cell-based options have gotten a bad rap from users who have had terrible Internet voice experiences. In those instances, the voice packets hopped from switch to switch, inserting latency, dropping packets and creating other problems in the process. The result was poor voice quality. Businesses have been deploying CPE to get toll-quality voice over frame relay and ATM for years. Whether the single provider service is based on IP, frame relay or ATM, the key to high-quality communications for now is a single provider controlling the network. With one service provider, the endto-end service performance is more easily controlled than under Internet conditions. Briere is president and Heckart is vice president of TeleChoice, a consultancy in Boston. They can be reached at dbriere@telechoice.com and checkart@telechoice.com. Eric Zines, a TeleChoice analyst, contributed to this column. [Copyright 1998, Network World]

To: Stephen B. Temple who wrote (2219)	12/26/1998 6:27:00 PM
From: Stephen B. Temple	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3178

Cisco switches prepped for voice Network World: San Jose Next year Cisco will add voice to its LAN switches, letting customers take advantage of a new class of applications and save money by putting voice and data on the same network. In the second half of 1999, Cisco will roll out new versions of its Catalyst 8500, 5000 and 4000 series switches that can handle call processing and LAN telephony gateway applications. Customers will be able to set up distributed call centers, voice-enhanced PC conferencing systems and customer service help desks with the new switches, says Mario Mazzola, senior vice president of Cisco's Enterprise line of business. Cisco is not the only internetwork vendor attacking the LAN telephony market. Rival 3Com recently formed a $100 million joint venture with telecom giant Siemens (NW, Dec. 14, page 10). But while 3Com is relying on voice expertise from a telecom stalwart, Cisco appears to be going it alone. Specifically, Cisco has been bolstering the packet forwarding, priority queuing and quality-of-service capabilities of the Catalyst line to reduce latency, delay and jitter for voice traffic. Cisco is also enhancing the switches' ability to forward traffic in real time for video applications, he says. The company is also integrating into the Catalyst line PBX and call processing technology obtained from its October acquisition of Selsius Systems, Mazzola says. "The switch fabric, internal delays and priorities, and global jitter of the platforms have been worked out in such a way that all these platforms will be capable of supporting call processing-related applications, " Mazzola says. Cisco will roll out its voice-enabled Catalyst switches in phases. Next summer, Cisco will unveil products for branch offices of 20 to 400 users, he says. The firm will unveil more scalable platforms for larger enterprises in 2000. "Our perception is that we will be able to scale up to 50,000 users," he says. Adding voice to the Catalyst switches will open up the $18 billion to $20 billion PBX, call center and voice messaging market to those products, Mazzola says. Reliability is key to making it possible, Mazzola admits. The jury is still out on whether packet-switched data infrastructures can provide the same reliability that circuit-switched nets have delivered for decades (NW, July 20, page 27). Perhaps reliability is the reason users have only dipped their toes into the voice/data convergence waters. "Right now, Kodak is not interested in integrating voice and data networks onto a single wire," says Eric Pylko, global systems coordinator at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, N.Y., a large Cisco Catalyst switch customer. "We have one or two pilots going with Cisco 3810s at remote offices." Cisco MC3810s are multiservice access concentrators for integration of data, voice and video onto public or private frame relay, ATM or leased-line nets. [Copyright 1998, Network World]

To: Stephen B. Temple who wrote (2219)	12/26/1998 6:49:00 PM
From: Stephen B. Temple	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3178

Beware the cult of IP Network World: The IP craze has hit an all-time high. The slogan "everything over IP and IP over everything" captures the zeal with which many in the industry are pursuing the expansion of IP-based features and services. Everything that can possibly be crammed into IP - or on top of it - is. The next step is to go completely minimalist - IP directly on fiber, or rather, over photons. Who needs Layer 2? Just slap Layer 3 directly on the media. That's the vision of some in the industry, including a Nortel Networks executive who waxed philosophical at the recent Internet Bandwidth (iBand) conference about unleashing gigabits of bandwidth in the public network. In his vision, high-speed routers would blast Ethernet frames over optical interfaces, directly onto SONET rings or the fiber itself. I understand the rush to embrace IP. All projections show that data will be the vast majority of traffic crossing networks over the next five years. So if you're going to build a new integrated services network, you would optimize it for data. What I don't understand is the fervor with which these IP-based efforts are being pursued. Many of the new features being added to IP, such as class of service (CoS) support and traffic management, already exist at other layers in the network. For reasons that are not strictly technical, these existing technologies are deemed inadequate and must be re-created in the image and likeness of IP. And so it will happen. A swarm of engineers is working on the technologies for building a multiservice Internet. IP-based CoS and traffic management and IP-based telephony will become realities. The issue is when - and at what price to enterprise users. As veterans of the Internet Engineering Task Force point out, the IETF is driven from the bottom up, not by a grand design. As a result, the standards-making body produces technology pieces, not integrated solutions. The building of end-to-end technologies falls to vendors, service providers and enterprise network operators. Right now, key IP multiservice technologies exist only as evolving piece parts. Consider Differentiated Services (Diff-Serv), the newest IETF approach to CoS. Designed for use in the Internet, Diff-Serv is elegant in its simplicity. Each packet is marked with a special flag (a series of bits) that indicates how it should be treated. At each router hop along the packet's path, the router sorts packets into queues based on the flag. The queues themselves get different treatment, such as differing shares of bandwidth, forwarding priority and probability of dropping a packet in case of congestion. To date, the IETF has defined few actual classes of service based on Diff-Serv. Also, there is room for interpretation of what has been defined. Consequently, enterprise customers and ISPs will need to write service-level agreements (SLA) that clearly spell out which applications get which types of flags and how the ISP will actually act upon those flags. Likewise, if the packet crosses the networks of multiple ISPs, these ISPs will have to define compatible SLAs and handle the packets in a comparable way for customers to receive the end-to-end service for which they've contracted. If two ISPs have incompatible SLAs or support different interpretations of the flags, the customer's end-to-end service will be "squishy," in the words of one of the Diff-Serv working group co-chairs. I don't know about you, but I don't think squishy CoS is going to cut it for voice. Or video. Fortunately, the sponsors of iBand, Stardust Forums, had the foresight to hold a meeting at the conference to discuss the need for a QoS forum. Representatives from nearly 50 companies attended the meeting. There was general agreement that such a forum is needed to clarify the business drivers behind QoS, bring the relevant technologies into focus and push interoperability testing. Such a forum is needed if IP-based CoS is to become a reality on the Internet. If the industry must rely on bilateral SLAs to achieve end-to-end service, we'll never get out of the squishy phase. Bear in mind that CoS is only one new area that the IETF is addressing. The organization now has roughly 200 working groups pursuing routing, addressing, security, policy and other technical areas. My concern is that, in this mad rush to embrace all things IP, we may fail to appreciate - and exploit - the capabilities of the installed base of technology we already have. IP is one technology tool among others and can be used in a complementary fashion with other technologies. It's not a savior. Enterprise customers need to avoid getting carried away by this wave of hype and focus on the problems they need to solve today and the spectrum of tools available to them. Petrosky is an independent technology analyst in San Mateo, Calif. She can be reached at mary@mpetrosky.com. [Copyright 1998, Network World]