Show spotlight to shine on IP voice

WASHINGTON, D.C. - This week's VoiceCon show promises to have convergence-hungry attendees anxious to dig into a variety of IP telephony fare at a time when budget woes have lesser priorities stuck on the back burner.

Companies such as Alcatel, Avaya, Mitel and Siemens will offer hardware and software aimed at letting users combine voice and data onto one network and take full advantage of converged applications. However, these vendors also will need to address nagging user concerns about IP telephony's sturdiness and ability to reduce IT costs.

VoiceCon is one of the few IT trade shows holding its own in this difficult economy. Three thousand are expected to attend, which would be an increase of 300 over last year. The number of exhibitors is up to 54 from 44 at last year's show.

As will be evidenced at the show, IP voice vendors are moving toward opening up and modularizing various parts of corporate telephony that are consolidated into one or two boxes in the proprietary PBX world. Equipment makers say this could help make corporate phone and messaging systems less expensive to buy and maintain.

One analyst says the move to modularity is a long time coming for telephony gear.

"Overall, the telecom industry has been about 25 years behind the PC industry," says Brian Strachman, an analyst with Instat/MDR. Whereas many data networks have evolved into intelligent PCs at the endpoint attached to Intel-based servers, telecom products have remained "mainframe-like," Strachman says, with centralized processing and "dumb" phone terminals as endpoints. Migration toward IP-based telephony, with voice as an application running on standard PC servers and over an IP network, could help businesses lower the price of voice system hardware and maintenance, he adds.

Alcatel is introducing its OmniPCX Enterprise, an upgrade of its OmniPCX 4400 phone switch, with native support for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and H.323. The box is an Intel server running Linux, as opposed to the proprietary hardware and Unix operating system used on the 4400 model. A digital card for the device will let Alcatel's circuit-switched phones be used on the system along with Alcatel's existing H.323-based IP phones.

Alcatel is not releasing its own SIP-based phone, the company says, but the OmniPCX Enterprise will work with other vendors' SIP-based phones, and is certified to operate with Pingtel's Expressa SIP phone and Windows Messenger, the SIP-based voice, video and instant-messaging client in Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. Alcatel says the product's nonproprietary hardware and software and its ability to be deployed on different types of SIP phones could help businesses lower costs.

Also, Avaya is introducing two messaging server products that could let customers deploy messaging anywhere throughout a company while supporting integrated voice/data applications. Avaya is migrating its Aria, Audix and Serenade voice mail platforms to its new S3400 Messaging Server, which is built on Intel hardware with support for Windows 2000 or Linux at the operating system level. The S3400 supports Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which let voice mail messaging integrate with e-mail clients more easily. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol support also can let the device integrate with other user directories, enabling single sign-on to voice and e-mail, while making user accounts easier to administer.