White Papers Index	Description
White Paper - VoIP 2.0 Meets Web 2.0	Until recently, the glacial movements of the incumbent carriers made it difficult to detect watershed events in the telecom industry. But the incumbents no longer control the events that shape telecom. Instead of the de jure telecom standards of the ITU, we have industry groups, such as the 3GPP, which developed IMS, the W3C, responsible for VoiceXML and other Web standards, and the IETF, which sets Internet standards. Then the Web 2.0 crowd, such as Google, Skype, and Yahoo! are creating their own “telecom standards.” Can telecom mashups be far behind?
White Paper - BladeWare in the Enterprise (Vendor Considerations)	The market for enterprise fax servers continues to grow, even as investments in TDM fax-server systems are declining. That's because IP-based fax servers are more than taking up the slack. Obviously, vendors that continue to "sit this one out" run the risk of being permanently left behind. Fax-server vendors must add support for IP fax. But as IP networking is new technology for many, there are plenty of questions. Chief among them are those concerned with the conversion between TDM and IP transport, the task of the IP-PSTN gateway. Sometimes the prospect has it already handled, presenting an interoperability question; other times your prospect looks to you, the vendor, to provide the gateway function. Then there's SIP trunking.
White Paper - E-Fax Services: The New Revenue Stream	ust a few years ago, offering Internet-based fax services required a major capital investment exceeding several millions of dollars for national coverage. But no longer. Suddenly, offering e-fax services is now the easiest and most-affordable path for the VoIP service provider, and even the ISP to follow, to add new revenue, profit, and positive cash. All-software (HMP) fax media servers, such as Commetrex' BladeWare™, and the new breed of IP-network wholesale carriers, such as Global Crossing and iBasis, drop the bottom out of capital requirements, reducing them, by millions of dollars, to under $25,000 for typical configurations.
White Paper - Framework Software	Telecom equipment OEMs are raising the bar on where value should be added in new-product development. Increasingly, value contribution is being limited to clearly differentiating features since ROI requirements have been tightened. Even when these decisions are made without the aid of MBAs, it's tough to justify developing non-differentiating aspects of a new product when its expected market life is only three years. So, instead of the pre-1984 vertically integrated structure of "Ma Bell", telecom is emulating the value-adding structure of the computer industry.
White Paper - Host Signal Processing	The power and affordability of the PC, the increasing role of communications in business and everyday life, and telecom deregulation have led to the evolution of products that support the economic development of telecommunications systems. Hardware and software value-adding components allow the system developer to skip the years and millions required to develop the bedrock telecommunications technologies needed in telephony systems and move directly to application development. This industry's structure, although much less mature, is traveling the same evolutionary path blazed by the PC industry, the most efficient value-creation industry of all time.
White Paper - Open Telecommunications Framework	Commetrex has developed an architecture for high-density telephony that smoothes the transition from TDM to IP transports for applications such as IVR, unified messaging, audio conferencing, and especially fax. Commetrex' Open Telecommunications Framework (OTF) takes advantage of the MSP Media Gateway PCI cards configured as "fax boards" to offer analog and digital interfaces to the PSTN. But it goes further by leveraging the economies made possible by blade servers combined with the OTF Kernel telephony middleware to extend the OEM's coverage to IP networks on the same system platform. This architecture gives the telephony system developer unprecedented options in networks and media that support new high-value applications such as IP-based fax servers.
White Paper - The Computer Telephony Middleware Challenge	When a CT OEM creates a system it needs application software, a host PC, media-processing boards and middleware. Middleware in this context is the software framework for system development. It is the software that lives between the application and the media-processing board. It manages system resources, handles call control and routing, system configuration and security, and so on. Where does the CT OEM get the middleware? The choices, of course, are either make or buy.
White Paper - The Next-Generation Media Server	Digital-media telephony systems implement applications such as media gateways, media servers, pre-paid calling, and unified-messaging systems by directing media-processing and stream- switching resources to perform various functions on call streams. In addition to the application, these systems are comprised of computing platforms, system software, media-switching and call- control resources, and media-stream processing resources. Media streams are made available to the system through network-termination devices. Calls are set up using call-control protocols associated with the network termination. These systems are quite complex and expensive when compared with off-the-shelf open-architecture computers. But within the past 10 months, technologies have been brought to market that, if effectively synthesized, have the potential of creating a beneficial discontinuity in the price, size, scalability, manageability, and power consumption of such systems.
White Paper - Whither the Fax Server	The fax server has been with us for over 15 years, but will it be around for another 15? Some would say that fax is dead. But don't count on that. It's difficult to overestimate the endurance of entrenched technologies, especially when they are affordable, useful, easy-to-use and serve a critical purpose. As long as there are paper documents with no electronic source available, there will be a need for fax or its equivalent. But what about the fax server and its hardware foundation, the multi-line fax board?
White Paper - Why Do VCs Throw Money Away	No, we're not talking about venture capitalists bidding against each other to fund the dot-com without a sensible business plan. This is about the VC that funds the digital-media telephony- equipment maker. They don't mean to throw money away; they're just unaware that much of their investment will reinvent the proverbial wheel. Just a few years ago they had no choice. But not any more. New solutions are available, and not just for early stage companies. Legacy vendors also have the same opportunity to save on new-product development while they dramatically shorten time to market and still maintain control of their strategic product platform.