December 15, 2010

(20)10 Days of Techness: On the Fifth Day of Techness IT Gave to We...Togetherness

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Welcome to the (20)10 Days of Techness. This is the fifth installment of a 10-part series of postings that will discuss prevalent trends during past year. Happy Holidays!

(Part 1)

(Part 2)

(Part 3)

(Part 4)

The past year has seen a lot of great new product and service introductions. Of course, communications and connectivity can only go so far if they exist on technological islands. To get to mass market you need the ability to connect and communicate with a broad community of individuals, networks and, preferably, endpoints and other gear. That’s probably why we’ve heard so much about federation and interoperability this year.

In late summer, a handful of vendors came together to form the Unified Communications (News - Alert) Interoperability Forum, whose aim is to unify what they say is a fragmented but vibrant UC ecosystem.

As companies like Polycom (News - Alert) push the benefits of HD voice, we also saw XConnect announce an HD voice peering federation in an effort to make wideband audio a mass market phenomenon.

Another important development on the interoperability front is the SIP Forum’s (News - Alert) work on SIPconnect, which specifies a reference architecture for SIP trunking, narrowing implementation rules and guidelines around SIP implementation. Ingate’s Steve Johnson (News - Alert) says that the release of SIPconnect 1.1, which is expected by the end of 2010, will be a big step toward standard SIP trunking implementations.

On the carrier Ethernet front, 2010 saw various companies, including startup CENX, Equinix (News - Alert) and Telx, launch carrier Ethernet exchanges. Nan Chen, CEO of CENX and president and board director of the Metro Ethernet Forum, explains that CENX offers a portal through which members can see what carrier Ethernet services, at what speeds and other parameters, are available, so other carriers purchase connectivity where and when it’s needed. And CENX does translation mapping between different tags or classes of service.

Jim Theodoras, director of technical marketing at ADVA Optical Networking, says that the launch of CENX was great validation of the MEF’s carrier Ethernet specification, but that as a result Ethernet services will become commoditized.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi