Enterasys, together with its alliance partner in SA, Duxbury Networking, and Siemens Information and Communications Group, have announced a strategy to assist companies to migrate to new-generation business communications by enabling their existing voice and data infrastructures to interoperate over local and wide area networks and the Internet.
The integration of existing telephony, data infrastructures and applications in SA over Voice over IP (VOIP)-based network infrastructures will result in one of the most important shifts in the telecommunications industry in SA, says Enterasys Networks SA regional director, Martin May.
He says the move to VOIP telephony will reduce costs significantly for corporate users and spur the development of a host of new commercial solutions for business and private consumers such as corporate directory integration, personalised menus, e-mail, distance learning programmes, online communities, calendaring services, and voicemail applications.
May sees the co-operation between Enterasys, Duxbury and Siemens providing a strategic direction for companies looking to merge the two worlds of voice and data in the local area, wide area and on the Internet, in anticipation of the deregulation of telecommunications services in SA in 2002.
"With a strong foundation in the mobile networks arena, which includes established GSM infrastructure, products, solutions and services for the next-generation Internet, and electronic business solutions, Siemens provides the full spectrum of mobile business solutions, allowing users to communicate and be connected to information and services any time and any place," says May.
"Additionally, our partnership is well placed to address the key challenges of VOIP implementation, including bandwidth constraints and the separate and distinctive requirements of WAN technologies such as Frame Relay, leased-line, dialup, ATM, SDH and others.
"For example, Enterasys experience in pioneering Layer 4 intelligent application control switching will allow application service providers to give priority to the voice packets on the network so that Quality of Service and voice quality levels - conforming to at least the H.323 video streaming standard - can be maintained."
Looking to the future, May says the VOIP market is currently enjoying the effects of a huge surge in interest globally. "The overall VOIP market is growing by 100% per quarter, while sales of older PBX units are decreasing by 16%."
He adds that commercially the market for VOIP services is significant and encompasses a wide range of applications such as unified messaging, voice recognition, high-quality wideband voice, and "find me" services, which will switch and forward calls according to user-defined rules and policies.
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