Plethora of convergence wares on tap

Convergence products announced last week from Cisco, AltiGen and Avaya could help customers more effectively link voice and e-mail applications, increasing user productivity and easing administration tasks.

The software and hardware products are aimed at small and midsize businesses - up to 1,000 employees - which typically have smaller IT staffs. Besides desktop productivity, vendors say converged IP telephony applications such as unified messaging can offer administration improvements by letting fewer staff support more applications.

Cisco added unified messaging to its Integrated Communication System (ICS) 7750, a combination IP PBX, unified messaging and application server for companies with 50 to 1,000 employees. The box now supports Cisco's Unity Unified Messaging 4.0 software, which can combine Cisco voice mail with messaging products such as Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Domino into a single back-end system and end-user interface. The software lets users receive voice mail and e-mails through a groupware client interface, where voice messages can be sorted, forwarded through e-mail and listened to on a PC or IP phone.

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Convergence products announced last week from Cisco, AltiGen and Avaya could help customers more effectively link voice and e-mail applications, increasing user productivity and easing administration tasks.

The software and hardware products are aimed at small and midsize businesses - up to 1,000 employees - which typically have smaller IT staffs. Besides desktop productivity, vendors say converged IP telephony applications such as unified messaging can offer administration improvements by letting fewer staff support more applications.

Cisco added unified messaging to its Integrated Communication System (ICS) 7750, a combination IP PBX, unified messaging and application server for companies with 50 to 1,000 employees. The box now supports Cisco's Unity Unified Messaging 4.0 software, which can combine Cisco voice mail with messaging products such as Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Domino into a single back-end system and end-user interface. The software lets users receive voice mail and e-mails through a groupware client interface, where voice messages can be sorted, forwarded through e-mail and listened to on a PC or IP phone.

The West Virginia University Foundation, an independent fund-raising group for the university, installed the ICS 7750 in its Morgantown office more than a year ago. Support for Cisco Unity on the ICS 7750 "is something we've been waiting for," says Mike Phillips, director of technical services for the 60-person office. "The ability to add [unified messaging] was one of the reasons we installed an IP phone system in the first place."

The organization could see productivity gains from its employees by combining access to voice mail and e-mail through a single Outlook interface, Phillips says.

Cisco's ICS 7750 starts at $15,000. Cisco Unity 4.0 costs $135 per user. Outlook is sold separately.

AltiGen announced its AltiServ1 IP and AltiServ2 IP telephony boxes, which are aimed at offices with eight to 600 users. The AltiServ products are server-based on an Intel/Windows 2000 Server with an IP switching architecture, while the previous AltiGen AltiServ boxes were a hybrid of IP and TDM architectures. Call processing is done on PCI cards in the servers, which run AltiGen's AltiOS embedded call control software. This allows for faster call processing and for survivability of phone service in the event of a server outage, the company says.

The AltiServ boxes support up to eight T-1/E-1 trunks for public switched telephone network or WAN service connectivity. The IP PBXs are based on the H.323 protocol, and work with AltiGen's Alti-IP 600 IP phones and H.323-based phones from Polycom and Siemens. Contact center software that integrates with Outlook and Goldmine CRM software also is included.

The AltiServ 1 and AltiServ 2 IP PBXs will be available on Feb. 15 at a per-seat cost of $200 to $500 (not including phones).

Also announced last week was an IP PBX for midsize and large businesses from industry newcomer Zultys.

On the convergence application front, Avaya announced that its Unified Messenger product now integrates with IBM Lotus Domino and Outlook messaging platforms, which will let users access voice mail, e-mail and faxes from a single interface. The software also lets users retrieve voice and e-mail messages over any phone connection, with a text-to-speech function that can "read" e-mails over the phone. Unified Messenger can interoperate with Avaya's Definity line of PBX phone switches, its Eclips IP PBX products, along with Avaya Octel and Audix voice mail systems. The software costs $400 to $600 per user.