Cisco Systems Inc. next week will announce plans to team with startup NBX Corp. to eliminate the need for separate phone and data networks in corporate branch offices.
The partnership entails integrating NBX's Ethernet phone gear with Cisco's IP voice-enabled branch office routers. The agreement is in keeping with the broad initiative Cisco announced earlier this year to help customers meld voice, data and video traffic on their enterprise networks.
Cisco and NBX will provide technology for making IP voice calls across frame relay and other corporate data networks or over the public dial-up phone network. The twist is that companies won't need to use small-office phone switches, which are known as key systems.
Instead, a LAN-to-telephone network gateway, called the NBX 100, will connect LAN-based NBX Ethernet telephones to the public telephone network over as many as five analog phone lines.
"This is a competitor to a key system in a branch office," said Dan Taylor, an analyst with Aberdeen Group Inc., in Boston.
Cisco and NBX will integrate NBX 100s with Cisco 2600 and 3600 routers so local Ethernet phone calls can be routed across a corporate wide-area data network as well.
When an end user dials a phone number, an NBX 100 will call out to the public net-work or divert the call to a local router. If the call is routed across the corporate WAN, a router and NBX 100 at the other end of the line will complete the call. This eliminates the need to use the public dial-up network and can avoid the use of dedicated phone trunks between corporate sites.
The Cisco-NBX system can even make for less expensive long-distance communications when the calling destination is not on the corporate net- work. For example, an employee in New York could call an off- net site in Los Angeles by going through the corporate network and having the call transferred to the off-net destination via an NBX 100 in Los Angeles.
The NBX device also completes calls within the same office and provides traditional key system features such as voice mail, call-detail recording, paging and music on hold. In addition, the NBX 100 supports computer-telephony integration.
Taylor said the Cisco-NBX alliance goes hand in hand with Cisco's introduction earlier this year of voice/fax cards for its 2600 and 3600 routers. The routers guarantee voice quality through traffic prior- itization features in Cisco's Internetwork Operating System software.
The Cisco-NBX system will be demonstrated next month at NetWorld+Interop 98 in Las Vegas.
Cisco: (408) 526-4000; NBX: (978) 749-0000.
RELATED LINKS
Apply for your free subscription to Network World. Click here. Or get Network World delivered in PDF each week.
Request a reprint or permission to use this article.
