[October 4, 2000]

Tundo Announces New Release Of Its Network Telephony System At Internet Telephony Conference & Expo

Tundo announced Release 3.3 of its Network Telephony System (NTS), which contains a broad spectrum of new tools and capabilities for the delivery of voice and media applications over networks. These enhancements have been designed in response to Tundo's real-world experience in deploying IP telephony solutions in mission-critical communications environments around the world.

The new Release 3.3 provides a host of new features and functions that will:

• Allow application developers (ISPs, ASPs, and LECs) to more easily create innovative media applications, as well as integrate existing ones;
• Enable service providers to offer a greater variety of voice services to customers;
• Empower enterprises to add voice as a hosted network service.

"With the release of its product, Tundo is demonstrating its ability to deliver features that are important to end users," said Tom Valovic, Research Manager with IDC. "Going forward, the company is well positioned to advance these capabilities and help define the emerging market."

"Tundo has added capabilities that extend their platform far beyond the IP PBX market into support for leading-edge call center and e-contact technology," said Eli Borodow, CEO of Telephony@Work, a global provider of open call center and e-technology. "Tundo and Telephony@Work offer complementary, award-winning approaches for eliminating all points of failure in a multimedia communications infrastructure - to guarantee maximum up-time and offer bullet-proof reliability. Together we can now offer forward-thinking contact centers the best of all worlds and an exciting alternative for deploying solutions in an IP-enabled world."

The following are new features being delivered in Release 3.3 of the NTS:

• Media Framework Enhancements: Release 3.3 includes enhancements in its Media FrameWork (MFW) that enable such advanced features as: call routing and reporting, monitoring and recording, and playback of voice information. The MFW is a complete, object-oriented application development environment that simplifies the development of telephony systems and features. MFW greatly simplifies the development and maintenance of IP media applications by offering a rich set of classes (programming calls), methods (techniques), and APIs that enables developers to control and manipulate voice and media streams without directly dealing with the complexity of the protocol stack.
  
  In addition, the MFW has been extended to support the two leading 3rd party call control interfaces, specifically:

CSTA (Computer Supported Telecommunications Applications): CSTA is a popular, standardized 3rd party call control interface, furnishing an easy path for application developers to design for IP Telephony, while allowing them to migrate their existing applications easily in the IP framework.

TAPI 2.1 (Telephony Application Program Interface) and WAV "Wrapper": TAPI is a 1st and 3rd party telephony call control standard developed by Microsoft and Intel. By combining TAPI and WAV media file support, Tundo provides a feature-rich IP solution for both call control and media delivery for unified messaging and other applications. This capability enables any media application that is written to the TAPI 2.1 interface to be implemented purely over IP. In other words, no voice processing boards are required.

• Distributed User Group (DUG): This key feature enables multiple customers or discrete groups of users to securely segment and customize the Tundo NTS to meet their specific needs. In other words, service providers can create a unique experience, with a custom set of applications and features, for individual customers or groups on a single IP infrastructure without worrying about security or privacy issues among groups. This is significant because service providers can enhance their bottom line by offering differentiated and enhanced voice services that are optimized for discrete customer groups and market segments.
• Tundo Media Server: The Tundo Media Server is a multipoint conferencing unit (MCU), which supports conferences between three or more callers. The Media Server can be configured as a software-only MCU, capable of supporting up to fifty G.711-based, three-party conferences, for a total of 150 parties supported per Media Server. For applications that require transcoding (G.711, G.723, G.729), with the addition of DSP resources, each Media Server can support up to 60 parties, in any grouping, in conferences of up to 30 participants. Any number of conferencing units can be supported by the system. Conferencing units can be geographically distributed across the network. Conferencing audio as well as conferencing setups are fault-tolerant and protected from MCU failures.
• Digital Gateway: Tundo's Digital Gateway offers high-capacity, high-quality and feature-rich interconnection between circuit-switched networks and voice and data applications on IP networks. The Digital Gateways support T-1/E-1 and PRI signaling variants.
• SMDI (Simple Message Desk Interface): Tundo's Voice Mail Interface, using the SMDI protocol (the most widely used protocol in voice mail systems) allows customers to move into IP telephony while maintaining their investment in existing voice mail systems.
• Network Address Translation (NAT): Tundo addresses the complexity of delivering IP voice communications through a corporate firewall. With NAT, customers can place and receive phone calls from a public IP network while maintaining the integrity of their firewall. Simply put, companies can make a pure IP phone call to or from anywhere in the world.

The convergence of voice and data creates new opportunities for IP media application development as businesses increasingly move to the Internet for applications, services, telephony, and a host of other developing technologies. Working independently or in conjunction with ASPs, application developers will need to tap this evolving market in order to grow their revenues and continue to meet customer demand.

Tundo's Media FrameWork (MFW), an object-oriented software development environment, delivers a simple-to-use, yet powerful, set of tools for the development of packet telephony applications. The MFW creates new capabilities for developers to control and manipulate voice and media streams as well as greatly simplifying the design and implementation of telephony systems and features. The incorporation of CSTA in Release 3.3 means that developers can move swiftly into IP telephony while still using their current applications and legacy equipment. Moreover, developers can quickly integrate new applications into the IP telephony framework without having to deal with complex, multiple standards. Tundo's platform, the most reliable and flexible available, opens new possibilities for developers, and, by proxy, for service providers and enterprises.

Service providers, particularly application service providers (ASPs), are one of the hottest and fastest growing market segments in the IT industry. Using Tundo's NTS, ASPs and data carriers are redefining the market by deploying a broad range of voice services over their existing data infrastructure. The ability to support multiple enhanced applications offers a high-value, differentiated addition to service offerings for emerging ASPs.

Tundo's NTS is the ideal platform solution for next-generation service providers. Release 3.3 expands the capabilities for voice hosting to new dimensions, including: closed-users groups (CUGs); multi-party call conferencing; the ability to offer multi-customer operation and administration easily; the capacity to simply and swiftly interconnect between traditional, circuit-switched networks and IP networks; and telephony firewall support.

Tundo's NTS makes system management simpler and more cost-effective. Its fault-tolerant architecture protects the Tundo system from possible network or subnetwork failures, minimizing downtime and reducing administrative support and maintenance costs. The user-friendly, graphical- or Internet-browser-based interfaces - accessible from local or remote locations - allows system administrators to easily and quickly configure, make changes to, or service the system.

Based on open standards, Tundo's NTS is one of the most scalable, reliable, fault-tolerant systems available today. It supports gateways, endpoints, and IP telephones from any vendors using common standards. Its flexibility easily permits virtually unlimited expansion; hundreds of thousands of users may be easily added to a network. And NTS is designed to provide the same carrier-class 99.999% reliability of today's traditional telephony systems.

Central to Tundo's system is its ability to protect and extend the customer's investment in traditional circuit-switched equipment while providing a quick, controlled, and painless bridge to packet-based telephony. Tundo's solutions are designed to yield large cost savings for network infrastructure and operations because they are easy to install and configure and are less expensive than proprietary circuit-switched systems. Combining voice and data traffic on the network provides cost and operational efficiencies. Moreover, customers are freed from proprietary vendor lock-in, and may henceforth choose best-of-breed telephony applications and devices. Tundo provides a controlled migration path to IP telephony that allows enterprise customers to utilize and extend their existing circuit-switched infrastructure, thereby protecting their investment in legacy equipment.

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