I attended only the exhibits, a couple of industry briefings, and a keynote from this conference. This conference is more enterprise and infrastructure focused than the VON conferences, or the IEC conferences (Supercom, etc) which focus more on carrier networks. The hot topics seemed to be:
The mood at this conference was more upbeat than perhaps much of the rest of the industry. Perhaps the enterprise segment has not been hit as hard as carriers by the slowdown. Many vendors were exhibiting broadband routers. More than a few were exhibiting high performance media servers and softswitches. A few were exhibiting signaling implementations and VoIP services and service platforms, but that definitely took a back seat to the transport products.
The exhibits for this conference are in an unusual format, though apparently several of the Key3Media conferences are run this way. The exhibits were open for two evenings only, and exibitors all had fairly limited and fairly standardized spaces. The result was much less glitz and hype and a focus on providing technical information on the products being displayed. More marketing glitz than a VON or IETF interoperability testing session, but significantly less than other conferences. There was very little overlap between the exhibitors for this conference and those for VON. The focus here was more clearly on IP network infrastructure, with voice just another source of packets most of the time. Here are some of the exhibitors I visited that I found interesting:
Pingtel was exhibiting their SIP phones and SIP applications as at VON. They were the only SIP endpoint vendor at the show as far as I could tell. The booth got a lot of traffic.
These folks were exhibiting a high performance security (SSL) platform capable of supporting 100,000 transactions per second. The application was basically offloading web and other servers using SSL and the platform was positioned like a firewall or load distributor in the network. Impressive, but as I understand it not yet available.
These folks exhibited an intrusion detection monitor. This is essentially a packet sniffer which looks for unusual network activity in order to detect intrusions – kind of like a virus scanner for networks. This is an interesting concept. Like a virus detector it relies on having “signatures” of intruder activity in order to recognize it. (Comment -- Probably a reasonable product but not something I’d rely on as the sole source of detection)
These folks have been exhibitors in other voice shows. They provide softswitch and media server/gateway implementations. Their pitch is that the “traditional” (Comment – how can you have traditions in an industry that’s only 4 or 5 years old?) VOIP architecture which sends RTP streams to an application server controlled media server mixes control and signaling and has trouble delivering many services. Instead they argue building the media capabilities into the gateway and using SIP+ (SIP with Info messages) to relay “trigger” information to an application server and get results. (Comment – This is a lot like using IN versus using service nodes and a worthy argument. Where it probably falls short is a lack of standards for triggers and info, and the need to provide specialized media services you don’t want in every gateway – the analog of the IN “send to resource” capability) They claimed AIN compatibility for their solution, though nobody in the booth really knew it well. The literature on it seemed to emphasize SS7-ISUP and not TCAP, though an architecture picture showed triggers/queries to an SCP.
SS8 showed their Softswitch/signaling gateway product (Signaling Switch). Similar to what they showed at VON and other shows.
I’ve seen Unisphere exhibit in other shows as a VoIP gateway or media server provider. Interestingly enough in this show they exhibited an IP services platform with voice being only a minor part. Again an indication of the focus of the show.
Bluesocket makes a firewall/authentication device that sits between wireless access points (802.11 and bluetooth), and a corporate network to provide security. They were one of several companies exhibiting products like this one including Cisco. Most of these products including this one claimed to use standard RADIUS and LDAP interfaces to access centralized information on user profiles and authentication. (Comment – this is exactly what we wanted to do in an office wireless network about a year ago and had trouble implementing at the time. It’s nice to see the industry meeting this need.)
These folks were exhibiting a chip/component solution which interfaced VoIP and TDM with high performance. This is the key component for media gateways and media servers with circuit interfaces. The company was (and may still be) in the business of supplying gateways and media servers but has decided to license some of their core technology to do this. They were selling development/design kits to go with it. (Comment – I think this may be another example of companies in a downturn looking for new markets for their technology and crossing out of their traditional “turf”)
This is a British company selling protocol implementations. They have implementations for SIP, Megaco, and H.323. They seemed knowledgeable about the issues, though one of very many companies with implementations at this point.
Jeff Pulver was there with a booth promoting the VON events. He made the comment to me that the crowd here was different, different exhibitors, and a lot more people wearing suits, something I had noticed. It’s also indicative than in 2 evenings of walking the exhibits I ran into only two other people I had met before at Pulver events.
Several companies were selling high performance routers and IP switches. I didn’t spend a lot of time on this other than to note that Moore’s law is alive and well and companies are keeping up with the explosion in bandwidth.
Two exhibitors showed “line of site” optical links. This is a nice technology for avoiding problems with licensing and construction of routes that would slow down implementation of fiber or radio links, but the key challenge in many areas is weather and other obstructions. Still interesting what you can get.
Lucent, Nortel, and Cisco each had booths though very limited. Lucent showed the Springtide IP services products. As noted above these deliver a variety of services that involve processing IP packet streams. Cisco was only showing it’s wireless access solutions. Nortel had information on several products, but again a very limited presence. This clearly wasn’t a carrier audience.