Presenting the 2009 TMC Labs Innovation Awards, Part 1
By: Tom Keating (News - Alert) and Richard “Zippy” Grigonis
Innovation is defined as the introduction of a new idea into the marketplace in the form of a new product or service, or an improvement in organization or process. TMC (News - Alert) Labs has been testing, examining, and reviewing products since 1994. The favorite part of our job is seeing new products and technologies, as well as improved versions of the classics.
2009 marks the 10th anniversary of our TMC Labs Innovation Awards. TMC Labs is proud to announce our 16 picks for this year’s awards, published in two parts. The complete winners list will appear in both issues, and the individual write-ups will appear in alphabetical order — beginning with Cypress Communications through LifeSize Communications in this issue, and Microsemi (News - Alert) through Zed-3 in our next (August 2009) issue.
Once again, our congratulations to those companies that continue to make this industry interesting for all of us.
First released in mid-2006 and continually updated and enhanced since, Cypress Communications’ C4 IP provides small-to-medium enterprises (typically having 50 to 100 seats in 2 or more locations) with advanced hosted enterprise-class communications services without the complexity and time required to build a premises-based solution and without the capital investment. (Although targeting SMBs, C4 IP has been used in a record-breaking hosted VoIP/UC deployment for a legal firm having 2,800 handsets across 11 offices.) C4 IP goes beyond hosted VoIP, providing voice and data access, phones, collaboration and video services, unified messaging and sophisticated PBX (News - Alert) functionality. C4 IP is supported by LAN/WAN management, a 24/7 fully redundant national VoIP network, high-touch customer service and a robust business continuity architecture. Since C4 IP is an outsourced solution, customers won’t waste time and money tinkering with it. (It would take an entire article to detail the immense functionality of C4 IP and the ultra-reliable network that backs it up.)
DiamondWare provides a unique audio mixing engine. They take individual audio streams in from each unique user, blend them together as appropriate (they can do this with thousands of audio streams) and deliver them to any number of recipient parties. The earliest user of this technology has been the U.S. Special Forces – they use it to distinguish the radio traffic from multiple teams of warfighters in the field. Indeed, DiamondWare can be utilized by the military, virtual world companies, game companies and enterprises. Many of them recognize DiamondWare’s capabilities that duplicate in the digital world the audio experience of voice to which we’re all accustomed. These include: Life-like sound using 32 kHz stereo (a phone call is 8 kHz monaural, which is only 1/8 of the audio information); 3D sound unique to each listener, which gives the feeling of knowing exactly where each party is situated; and having the conversation volume be louder as you move physically closer to the party you’re speaking with (just like being at a cocktail party, you can distinguish voices by location and the closest voices are loudest). This client/server technology can be offered as both a hosted and a premise product solution.
Although more and more organizations are adopting VoIP — with its signaling based on the Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (SIP) — such services are bandwidth and delay sensitive. Indeed, VoIP calls rely on some multiple network components outside of company control. Fortunately, Dotcom-Monitor’s SIP Monitoring is an online monitoring service that proactively determines the ability of VoIP infrastructure components to support VoIP calls. The SIP-based monitoring service acts as an end client, periodically placing VoIP telephone calls to a specified number and checking the call results. You just provision SIP Monitoring as either an extension or a client on your VoIP system and configure it to call a specific number using a specified SIP server with certain parameters. VoIP system service failures can be discovered by the proactive SIP-based monitoring system and the resulting error report helps to pinpoint where the error condition is occurring.
Hammer Edge represents the next generation of testing technology for service providers, network equipment manufacturers and large enterprises that deploy devices, services and/or applications on next-gen all-IP networks. Hammer Edge grants the ability to understand the effect of normal and harmful data traffic on real-time services of voice and video in both secure and unsecure scenarios. By emulating realistic behavior of users (agents and customers), devices and network topologies, all at high capacities, and predicting the realistic user experience of pre-deployed multiservice networks and services in a very simple and effective manner, Hammer Edge improves test productivity, product quality, time-to-market and revenue, as well as reduces the risk of SLA penalties. It can test various edge devices, including: session border controllers, firewalls, security gateways, and perform deep packet inspection. A Fortune 500 utility company is using Hammer Edge to connect multiple call center sites together, resulting in a 25 percent improvement in agent efficiency.
Ericsson (News - Alert)
SM480 Metro Ethernet Service Transport Platform
www.ericsson.com
Ericsson’s SM 480 Metro Ethernet Service Transport platform serves as the basis for Ericsson’s metro solution targeting wireline or converged operators. Thus, the SM 480 ultimately serves business service providers, residential service providers, peering exchange carriers, and mobile backhaul providers. By delivering a combination of large-scale IP/MPLS transport and granular service level agreement capability, service providers can leverage the network economics of Carrier Ethernet while migrating from legacy connectivity (such as ATM) to an IP-over-Ethernet packet-based infrastructure without costly “forklift upgrades”. The SM 480 doesn’t erase-and-replace transport networks, but is a complement to them. The SM 480 supports E-LINE capacity (via VLAN or MPLS VLL circuits) that’s 4 to 8 times greater than its competitors.
Grandstream has added to its line of innovative, SIP-enabled, IP voice and video products with the GXV3140 IP multimedia phone, which combines advanced real-time video conference capability with popular web and social networking applications. It features an advanced 1.3 megapixel tilt-capable CMOS camera (with privacy shutter), a 4.3-inch, 480x272 digital color LCD screen, dual Ethernet ports, SD and USB ports, a stereo headset jack, TV-out, stereo audio-out, and a full duplex speakerphone. This web-friendly device even supports a full HTML web browser, IM with Yahoo/MSN/Google (News - Alert), and 1-touch instant access to thousands of Internet radio stations, streaming audio/video, popular online music networks such as Last.fm, Yahoo Flickr web photo album, personalized RSS feeds of news/weather/stock/currencies (based on automated detection of the user’s location), calendar, alarm clock, and works in 9 languages. Indeed, it’s difficult to figure out what the GXV3140 doesn’t do. It runs out of the box with zero configurations, letting you make video calls almost immediately. The GXV3140 also incorporates Grandstream’s interesting peer-to-peer technology, so you can connect with friends and family via high-quality realtime videoconferencing over any distance for free.
Service providers and web content providers will be hard-pressed to find another company that can provide the core IP network virtualization capabilities with the scale and efficiency of Juniper’s TX Matrix Plus, a multi-chassis core routing system architecture designed to support up to 25 Tbps of capacity by integrating up to 16 T1600s into a single multi-chassis routing node. The TX Matrix Plus works with the Juniper Control System (JCS) 1200 (the industry's first control plane scaling system) to allow the virtualization of routing systems, networks and services The TX Matrix Plus/JCS 1200 combination can be carved out into many individual (up to 32), fully secure virtualized routers. Each of these individual routers can operate entirely independently, running separate services and service characteristics (e.g., bandwidth speeds, quality of service), and even multiple versions of an operating system. They also may perform the functions of multiple network elements (which otherwise would require separate devices), such as traffic aggregation and core routing. Importantly, all of this can be managed by different organizations within the same network operator, eliminating the organizational barriers. Moreover, TX Matrix Plus delivers up to 25 percent more routing capacity in the half the footprint, and with up to 40 percent less power than competing solutions.
LifeSize (News - Alert) Communications Inc.
LifeSize Room 200
www.lifesize.com
The new version of the LifeSize Room 200 High Definition videoconferencing system provides standards-based 1080p30 for the highest available resolution and 720p60 for the best motion handling with half the latency. The embedded 6-way HD CP (Continuous Presence) Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) supports all video modes including 1080p30 and 720p60. (Both multipoint options come standard with LifeSize Room and are made complete with transcoding support.) The MCU also supports conferences with up to 4 visible participants and 6-way HD VAS (Voice-Activated Switching) multipoint. Moreover, Room 200 comes standard with transcoding and all digital I/O, in a unit less than half the size of competing solutions. The fully integrated system delivers clear video clarity and HD audio for conferencing using less than 1 Mbps bandwidth. Now just about any organization can enrich its meetings by sharing documents and data quickly and easily.
Tom Keating is TMC’s CTO. Richard “Zippy” Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.
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