Beyond the quality and accessibility of the
products we’ve come into contact with (such as Cisco’s
voice-enabled routers and the Selsius IP phone system), we
think AVVID is significant for a couple of reasons. First, it
indicates Cisco’s dedication to carrying through with their
version of what telephony will come to mean over the next few
years (i.e., one part of an open, integrated communications
network). AVVID also serves to put at least a part of Cisco’s
whirlwind of acquisitions into a coherent framework, and shows
us that they have done a lot more with the technology they’ve
acquired than simply repackaged product lines. Finally, AVVID
provides businesses with a logical and realistic way of
deploying IP telephony in the enterprise to save money and
improve efficiency without sacrificing quality or convenience.
Together with their abundant activity in the carrier space
(represented in their Open Packet Telephony effort), AVVID
tells us that Cisco will have a central role in defining
convergence technology.
— Bill Michael
CLARENT’S THROUGHPACKET AND VOIP GATEWAYS
Clarent ’s (Redwood City, CA — 650-306-7511, http://www.clarent.com/)
carrier-class VoIP gateways have proven themselves ready for
primetime during the past year, and have put this startup on
the map alongside the giants of the industry. The gateways are
admirably flexible. All ports can handle realtime voice, fax,
and data transmissions. And they incorporate, from what we’ve
seen, the best C7 signaling and international protocol support
— a must for providing international long distance, currently
one of IP telephony’s biggest real world implementations. This
spring, Clarent also introduced ThroughPacket , a
technology that caught our attention and made us even more
excited about the company’s contribution to IP telephony.
ThroughPacket is software that sits on a server between
gateways and routers, and speeds up packet throughput by
aggregating traffic to common network destinations in single
packets; thus improving effective bandwidth and reducing
latency.
— Bill Michael
COSMOCOM’S VIRTUAL ACD
CosmoCom ’s (Hauppague, NY — 516-851-0100, http://www.cosmocom.com/)
Universe is a pure-IP play in the virtual ACD category.
It lets you tie in remote agents all over your IP WAN, linking
low-bandwidth interactions (think: “text chat”) over the
Internet, and high-bandwidth interactions, like IP voice or
dual-browser control, over managed IP networks. It does this
while still leaving the door open to any PSTN caller. Universe
has all the skills-based routing we’ve seen in PC-based
adjuncts to traditional ACDs. It also has one of the cleanest
and most useful browser-based agent desktops we’ve seen.
— Ellen Muraskin
CRYSTAL GROUP’S DATAREACH
The DataReach keyboard/ video/mouse extender card
from fault resilient computer maker Crystal Group
(Hiawatha, IA — 800-378-1636, http://www.crystalpc.com/)
lets you locate your keyboard, video monitor, and mouse up to
500 feet away from your computer or server farm. The DataReach
card has a transmitter that’s situated entirely within the
computer (no additional rack space is needed), uses computer
power (no additional power supplies needed) on the transmitter
end, and works equally well in a free ISA or PCI slot.
