Showtime for VoIP, security

LAS VEGAS - 3Com and Cisco will marshal a parade of IP telephony vendors pitching new wares this week at NetWorld+Interop as the industry moves to make enterprise voice over IP more scalable and IP phones more mobile.

Security hardware makers also will be prominent as they debut gear upgraded for detecting and reacting to network intrusions, and roll out Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)-based products designed to ease deployment of VPNs.

With about 275 exhibitors scheduled, this week's N+I - the only Interop in the U.S. this year - will be about half the size of last year's Las Vegas show, which was half the size of the 2001 show. Nevertheless, interest in VoIP, Wi-Fi and VPN infrastructure products is expected to be strong.

Among the announcements:

• 3Com, with its Voice Core Exchange V7000, wants to enter the large-scale VoIP product market.

• Cisco and SpectraLink  will present Wi-Fi IP phones for bringing mobility to IP telephony.

• Fortinet  will debut Gigabit-speed intrusion-detection gear that promises new approaches to intrusion detection and prevention.

• SSL VPN hardware from Neoteris is aimed at securing remote-user applications, while making VPN management easier than IP Security -based equipment.

3Com is launching its VCX V7000 platform for supporting IP telephony in large organizations. The softswitch is a modified version of the carrier softswitch made by 3Com's former CommWorks division, which 3Com sold to UTStarcom.

3Com says the VCX V7000 will let corporations bring carrier-class scale and reliability to IP telephony networks. It will compete with offerings from Avaya, Cisco and Nortel. The CommWorks softswitch already is deployed as part of a hosted VoIP service from MCI, formerly WorldCom, and at AT&T for offloading TDM backbone traffic to the carrier's IP network.

A combination of 3Com NBX and CommWorks softswitch  gear is being rolled out at Prudential North West Properties, a real estate firm in Oregon and Washington.

"The [3Com softswitch] appealed to us because . . . it's obvious that it can scale," says Sean McRae, vice president and CIO at the real estate firm.

The softswitch will be used as a central call-control engine for 20 offices connected by a WAN. The branches will have a mix of NBXs and phones, and Session Initiation Protocol phones that the softswitch controls centrally.

3Com's softswitch is a call-control and applications platform that runs on Sun's SunFire Unix server platform. The software is based on SIP , a real-time communications control protocol that vendors such as Microsoft and Siemens are adopting. The softswitch can be used to provide calling features and unified messaging applications for tens of thousands of users - far beyond what its NBX IP PBX phone system can handle, the company says.

"We're also very interested in SIP and the open architecture" of the softswitch, McRae says. "Down the road, SIP will allow us to integrate different kinds of phones and other devices from a number of vendors."

3Com says it will work to integrate its NBX and VCX V7000 platforms as a single VoIP system over the next year.