Cycos Adds Terminating IP Fax to its UM System
When Cycos AG (Alsdorf, Germany), a unit of Siemens, decided to
add terminating T.38 fax support to MRS, its popular unified messaging platform,
the company looked for a product that would support all current open standards, was
interoperable-proven, and would be easy to integrate into their
system. Cycos selected Commetrex' TerminatingT38(tm).
Martin Abels, Product Marketing Manager for Cycos, explains:
"We performed an extensive search to find a product that would meet our project
requirements, but could only find one, Commetrex' TerminatingT38. We needed to terminate
T.38 sessions. Not only did Commetrex have the technology, but they offered us a
test version at no charge that allowed our development group to be confident in
the product' ability to perform well before licensing it."
Recently acquired by Siemens' Information and Communication
Networks Group (ICN), Cycos is a specialist in the fast-growing market for unified-messaging
solutions. Cycos' solutions are based on their Message Routing System (MRS),
which enables companies to manage and optimize communication work flow, and to
streamline business processes while reducing operating costs.
Due to their multi-PBX capability, Cycos' solutions can be seamlessly
integrated into homogenous and heterogeneous communication network
infrastructures. MRS provides flexible solutions of high-scalability for the converging
telecommunication and IT markets. The provision and integration of server
applications for fax, voice-mail, and e-mail messaging, including support of
mobile, computer telephony integration and call-center technologies are all
part of Cycos' product portfolio.
TerminatingT38, is a combination of ITU T.38 fax and T.30 ITU fax
protocol engines. It gives the developer of a network-service platform or an
enterprise fax server the technology necessary to terminate T.38 fax (IP network)
real-time fax transmissions, the same as it would real-time faxes from the
PSTN using analog modems.
"We were really pleased with the before-purchase support we
received from Commetrex'. They were always available to answer questions from our
engineering group and offer useful technical advice," adds Abels. "Bottom line is that
we wanted to give our customers a choice. Some are happy using ISDN for fax, but
some are now asking for an FoIP solution. We had already implemented VoIP
as an offering, so this was the natural next offering to add."
For more on Cycos AG, visit http://www.cycos.com/
For more information on TerminatingT38, contact Cliff Schornak at
770.449.7775 x330 or cschornak@commetrex.com. Or visit,
http://www.commetrex.com/products/
algorithms/TT38PB.html
More Host Signal Processing Resource Testing Results
Many of you have asked about the host-PC resource requirements
for our BladeWare(tm) and MSP-H8 products, both of which use host signal processing.
BladeWare is Commetrex' client-server telephony middleware that targets IP media
server and unified-messaging applications. The MSP-H8 is a 1-8-line PCM
interface PCI board that uses host signal processing to lower costs while
supporting signal-processing tasks with a wide range of resource requirements.
Both products were tested using our C-reference fax modems. The
results are encouraging, especially if you consider that we've not optimized
the modems for the Intel architecture.
The products are offered on Win32, Linux, and Sun Solaris; the
tests were run on a Windows 2000 System with an AMD Athlon 2100XP, 1.7GHz. The
system uses approximately 40-Mbytes of RAM with no active channels. Each active
channel adds about 0.8-Mbytes. The per-cent CPU utilization is given below. It's
a loop-around test, so half of the channels are transmitting and half receiving
V.17, which is the 14,400 BPS fax modem.
Channels Per-Cent CPU
2 5%
4 10%
8 16%
12 22%
16 28%
22 32%
So, from these numbers, it's easy to conclude that using no-cost
host MIPS is the way to go for systems requiring up to 32 channels of voice-fax.
For more on BladeWare, visit
http://www.commetrex.com/products/
CTMiddleware/BladeWarePB.html. Or
contact Bruce Adams at 770.449.7775 x370 or badams@commetrex.com.
BladeWare Goes Beta
And we're looking for testers. We have six early adopters, but
we want as many different SIP situations as we can get. So if you
1. Have an all-IP digital-media application,
2. Can perform testing with voice and/or terminating fax, and
3. Use SIP signaling,
We want you to be a BladeWare(tm) beta tester.
You can learn more about BladeWare at
http://www.commetrex.com/
BladeWare_front.html.
If you're interested please give Mike Coffee a call at
770-449-7775 x310 or drop him an e-mail at sales@commetrex.com.
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Lunch With an Investment Banker
Our CEO had lunch with an investment banker last quarter. The
discussion turned to market drivers and restraints for the value-adding-component
model in the digital-media telephony equipment market. They discussed how the
value-adding model in any technology market must evolve as the technology,
capital-formation, and business-model steering currents change. Developers of
enterprise equipment have been the early adopters of the model, but what about the
carrier-equipment vendors? Will the drivers soon outweigh the restraints?
Check it out at http://www.commetrex.com/
Company_Overview.html.
More on Rolling Your Own
Plan to sell 10,000 units per year of your new digital-media
system? If so, you can probably afford to develop most of the system's components
from scratch. But should you? Need to solve a unique problem for a customer?
You probably can't afford to develop anything but the application. And there
have been value-adding platforms around for years that would allow you to only
develop the application, as long as your media requirements were supported by
the platform vendor. We will address the 10,000-unit question in a subsequent
issue of The Outlook, but what about the low-volume application that's neither
voice or fax, and not supported by the legacy platform vendors? Commetrex
recently received a design win that illustrates just how relative the term
"open" is.
All value-adding platform vendors say they're "open",
but just what that means varies from vendor to vendor. Legacy vendors use the term to
mean that you can add application-level value using their API. But anything else
is off limits. At Commetrex, it means that you can use any combination of
components of our value-adding platform, substituting your technology wherever it's
needed and stay out of "captive-technology jail".
Here's an example: A Latin American carrier wanted to replace
720 individual modems used to manage payphones with an easy-to-maintain
high-density fully redundant system. Since the protocols of each phone manufacturer
are proprietary, the system developer required complete control of the modem
implementation. The developer's requirements were:
1. Quad E-span PCI boards with the signal-processing resources to
implement 120 modems that were a mix of 1200 and 9600 bps.,
2. An open streams environment to support the developer-produced modems, and
3. A productive media-technology development environment.
It turns out that multiple developers bid on the contract, and
each of them based their proposals on Commetrex' MSP products. The operational system
uses the MSP-320 Media Stream Processor combined with the Quad E1/T1 daughterboard
and the OpenMedia(tm) streams framework. Modem development is being done using
the MSP-H8 8-Line Analog PCM interface and its associated software. Open
Telecommunications Framework(R) Kernel provides the system-level framework, and
the host signal-processing (HSP) version of OpenMedia provides the streams environment.
The modems will be written and validated in C. The productive
development environment of C-coded PC-based software is fully leveraged by developing
the media-processing software first for the host, and then validating the code
using the MSP-H8. The C-coded modems then execute in the embedded version of
OpenMedia on the MSP-320. OpenMedia's Packaging Utility resolves the
differences between the host and embedded execution environments of OpenMedia.
Once the embedded versions of the modem are validated, the
MSP-320, along with OpenMedia, will be ported to the developer's in-house framework.
Check out the Open Telecommunications Framework products at
http://www.commetrex.com/OTF_Portal.html.
If you want to learn more about this application contact Cliff
Schornak at 770-449-7775 x370 or e-mail him at cschornak@commetrex.com
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