February 2001

Is Your IP Telephony Systems Soup Yet?

BY JIM MACHI

In short, depending on what you're creating, your building blocks are whatever components you need to create your value in the IP telephony world. But no matter what your building blocks, I can tell you from experience that the ingredients you choose to put into your solution correlate directly to the type of product that comes out. It's a lot like making minestrone. You get out what you put in. I always choose the best ingredients: fresh vegetables and herbs lovingly prepared by an expert chef (me). That combination always makes a better soup than frozen vegetables and rushed preparation. And I never forget to top the soup with freshly grated Parmesan cheese. The kind in the canister from the grocery store just won't do: Only the best components make the best soup.

HOW IP TELEPHONY BUILDING BLOCKS EVOLVED
The evolution of IP telephony building blocks has paralleled the evolution of the IP telephony industry. The depth of choices for the various building blocks has grown from the early days of "Does anyone have anything that remotely works?" to "Does anyone have anything that works according to the spec sheet and actually complies with standards?" to today, where you have a wide range of pretty much interoperable choices to meet your specific product needs. In the early days the IP telephony shows were all "vendor-on-vendor" shows. For instance, the chip and stack vendors were trying to sell to companies like Dialogic. It seems like half my time then was spent with my prospective vendors. The other half was spent with prospective customers -- those making gateways and media servers. It wasn't until 1999 that I really saw our customers' customer base start attending the IP telephony shows. Today we see a healthy ecosystem of companies exhibiting at shows. (For an example, check out INTERNET TELEPHONY� Conference & EXPO this month in Miami.)

THE EMERGING TREND
One clear trend is the convergence (I guess an Internet telephony article isn't complete without that word) of what was historically multiple building blocks into fewer building blocks -- maybe even a single building block. For instance, in the protocol stack and DSP space there is a trend to combine the two. Look at the Web sites of RADVision and Trillium Digital Systems. Both of these leading H.323 (as well as other IP telephony protocol) vendors have announced numerous relationships with IP phone vendors and application providers.

In 1999, Texas Instruments, a leading DSP chip vendor, bought Telogy Networks, a stack provider. To date that acquisition has yielded pre-integrated real-time operating systems, DSPs, and stack technologies targeted to IP phone vendors. The Trillium and RADVision Web sites also have intriguing mentions of relationships with chip vendors -- Trillium with some communication chip start-ups and RADVision with Audiocodes regarding the RADVision stacks with the Audiocodes packet processor chips.

According to Michelle Blank, vice president of galactic marketing at RADVision, this emergence of VoIP directly on the chips is no accident. "There's a lot of activity in this regard, and we expect to be making additional announcements in 2001." This makes for a more highly integrated building block that allows the solution provider, who traditionally handled integration, to concentrate on the solution instead.

"SOUP'S UP!"
The bottom line? No matter where you play in the IP telephony ecosystem, you can likely find a solution that fits your specific needs. You should choose your solution wisely depending on your deployment scenario. In a vigorously contested market like IP telephony, you get what you pay for. Remember where your ingredients come from. And don't forget: Good engineering, like good cooking, can make or break the end product. Your results should be nothing but delectable.

Jim Machi is director, product management, CT Server and IPT Products, for Dialogic Corporation (an Intel company). Dialogic is a leading manufacturer of high-performance, standards-based computer telephony components. Dialogic products are used in fax, data, voice recognition, speech synthesis, and call center management CT applications.

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