This post was written by Bob Emmerson, No Jitter Contributing Editor for Europe. Aculab goes back to 1990 when Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) was being hyped to the hilt. At that time, the company was a serious player at the OEM/board level and the key product was a media-processing card known as Prosody. Since those early CTI days, Aculab's expertise and experience has facilitated the development of products that enable the transition to hybrid VoIP/TDM telephony environments. And along the way they developed Prosody X technology, which has been widely deployed by the developers of VoIP and PSTN telephony solutions. However, outside that community this award-winning OEM technology is less well known.That scenario is set to change. Aculab has introduced a range of gateway appliances that leverage Prosody X technology. The first two are an ApplianX IP Gateway and ApplianX Gateway for Microsoft OCS 2007. The design philosophy is to deliver solutions that focus on specific convergence issues and to address them in depth via single-purpose, plug-and-play devices.
Both gateways are robust, fully featured products. For example, they can have up to eight T1/E1 interfaces, there is comprehensive support for PBX-interworking protocols as well as a broad range of voice codecs. Other features include dual IP traffic interfaces, hot swap power supplies and RAID arrays.
The Gateway for Microsoft OCS 2007, as illustrated, incorporates the Mediation Server into a "basic hybrid" product. The IP/TDM conversion is the same, as is the connection to OCS for call control, but this concept offers cost savings and a number of additional benefits over the "basic" gateway. This is a summary:
* Lower total cost of ownership: you don't have to procure, configure, install and manage a separate Mediation Server.
* Fewer points of failure: OCS solutions require so many components/servers that being able to remove one is an attractive proposition.
* Remote configuration and security: It's advisable to keep a basic gateway separate from the OCS network, because there is no security in the media between the Mediation Server and the gateway. This makes it difficult remotely configure the gateway. There are no configuration or security issues with a hybrid gateway.
* Voice quality: With a hybrid gateway, voice quality is guaranteed because audio is not unnecessarily forced through the network.
Other appliance products in the pipeline include a DPNSS-to-Q.SIG Gateway, SIP Trunking Gateway, a 3G Video Gateway, an IP Video Gateway and two dual-redundant signaling nodes.
