Posted: 9:00 p.m. EST, 3/5/98

LOS ANGELES -- Computer board and system makers previewed their coming wares at the Computer Telephony Expo conference in Los Angeles this week, as they attempted to wedge their way into the explosive telecommunications equipment market. Hot-swap boards and systems, auxiliary computer-telephony buses and gear for a new integrated-telephony software specification were all present on the show floor, with availability promised by the middle of this year.

"Telecommunications equipment is estimated to be a $150 billion industry today, with 90 percent of the business built on proprietary hardware and software architectures, " said Allen Carney, vice president of marketing and business development for Natural Microsystems (Framingham, Mass.). "The biggest obstacles to innovation have been the lack of high availability and the shortage of software developers who can work on these systems."

But now, he said, the recent advent of hot-swap methodologies in standard PC buses and operating systems will enable "the migration of the network infrastructure to open standard hardware and software, which provides immediate access to a dramatically increased number of qualified developers and sophisticated development tools."

The confluence of CompactPCI (CPCI) and telecommunications is the hottest thing going in embedded computing, according to Brough Turner, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Natural Microsystems. "There's a lot of excitement in CPCI about telecom," he said, "and telecom is dying to have CPCI. There will still be a place for some fixed-function, proprietary switching and routing hardware, but otherwise, all intelligence will moved to mass-market computer technology. Open telecommunications will permeate the worldwide communications infrastructure, and CompactPCI is a key component to get the mass-market stuff in."

The CompactPCI Computer Telephony (CT) Spec and Hot Swap Spec from the PC Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (Wakefield, Mass.) are about 30 to 60 days away from being approved specifications, according to Joe Pavlat, PICMG president and director of strategic planning for the Motorola Computer Group (Tempe, Ariz.).

Though not finalized, both specifications were featured in products on the CT Expo show floor. The CT spec takes its lead from the H.110 CT Bus, a merger of the MVIP and SCbus computer-telephony buses that has been developed by the Enterprise Computer Telephony Forum. The H.110, now in the final approval stage at ECTF, is the CompactPCI version of H.100, which is ECTF's CT Bus for PCI systems.

Mark Overgaard, president of Pigeon Point Systems, noted that the software foundation for hot swap will come with Release 5.0 of Microsoft Windows NT. It is already provided in SCO Unixware 7 and in updates for Novell Netware. Overgaard said that high-end systems from Sun Microsystems demonstrate the hot swap capability for Solaris, though Sun has been mum on the issue.

Into the fray
At CT Expo, Force Computers (San Jose, Calif.) bowed a 16-slot CompactPCI system called the Centellis CT Series 16000, a "live insertion-ready" system with H.110 in residence. With its 14 I/O slots and high-density CompactPCI connectors, "The system can offer up to three times the telephone line capacity over traditional solutions available with commercial PCs," said Chris Williams, vice president of marketing at Force Computers. Commercial PCs typically offer a maximum of four PCI slots. Up to four of the new systems can be stacked in a six-foot rack, he said, "for an extreme line capacity of over 5,000 voice channels."

The Force systems, based on the Pentium and Windows NT, will be available in May at $5,995. An UltraSparc/Solaris version will appear in the second half.

For its part, the Motorola Computer Group (Tempe, Ariz.), which introduced a "hot-swap-enabled" CompactPCI chassis in January, came to the show with passive-backplane CPU boards and systems offering "extreme" I/O in a mix of ISA and PCI bus slots. Equipped with a Pentium-based single-board computer, the new systems offer 19 slots of I/O: four PCI slots and 15 ISA slots; or, with four PCI bridge chips resident on the backplane, five ISA slots and 14 PCI slots.

Computer-telephony markets are "very I/O intensive," said Paul Virgo, product marketing manager for Intel-architecture CompactPCI at Motorola. And though Motorola is "looking forward to CompactPCI," he said that "many small service providers building voice-mail systems, fax-on-demand systems, etc., often don't want to change primarily because there's a whole raft of legacy I/O products out there [for computer telephony ], especially on the ISA bus."

Though the Motorola systems do not allow boards to be hot swapped, they do contain a hot-swap cooling subsystem, a pair of redundant hot-swap power supplies and, optionally, hot-swap disk drives. They also sport monitoring features with alarms and indicators for power, heat and disk and fan operation. Pricing starts at $3,695, with availability in April.

At the conference, Natural Microsystems showed what it claims are the first CompactPCI computer-telephony boards to implement hot swap. These are DSP-based quad-T1 and quad-E1 boards running under Windows NT Server and Unix. They'll be available in April. Henceforth, the company will introduce CompactPCI versions of its boards 60 to 90 days after PCI versions become available.

A voice in the wilderness?
CT Expo also saw the first draft release of the MSP (Multi Stream Processor) specification and the first MSP-compliant board from Commetrex Corp. (Norcross, Ga.), a prime driver behind the spec. The MSP draft "specifies a comprehensive multi-stream software environment that permits media-processing vendors to develop to one open, portable environment, rather than for multiple proprietary environments which lack the potential of broad market coverage," explained Martin Lippman, vice president of marketing at Commetrex.

The spec comes from a consortium of seven companies formed last August-- Commetrex, Bicom Inc., Calibre Industries Inc., Centigram Communications Corp., Cole Technical Services, Pika Technologies Inc., and QNX Software Systems Ltd. Their goal is to decouple DSP-based media-processing algorithms from specific hardware resources and operating systems. Recently, Computer Communications Specialists, Inc., MiBridge, Inc., and NKO Inc. joined the group.

"Many companies in computer telephony claim they provide 'open' products when what they are truly offering are proprietary, programmable boards," said Lippman. "These 'open' products are 100 percent controlled by their manufac turer. They are no more 'open' to the computer telephony industry than the products they are replacing. Try to put your fax processing function on 'open platforms' such as Dialogic's CT Media Services, Brooktrout's Boston or Natural Microsystems's CT Access. Without their approval and cooperation, it's not possible. They offer no tools to enable it and they won't permit it."

Notably missing from the list of MSP Consortium members are any DSP chip vendors and any of the well-known DSP board vendors. "I'm quite skeptical of anyone trying to genericize like that," said Yogendra Jain, vice president and general manager of the DSP Division of RadiSys Corp. (Newton, Mass.), which has just completed a new operating-system kernel, specific to TI's C6X DSP and telecommunications applications.

But Tim Marchant, software business manager at Spectrum Signal Processing Inc. (Burnaby, British Columbia), feels quite differently. "The market has to be able to move and adapt," he said, "and I'd really like to see a market where independent software vendors could add value to platforms so that individual customers could mix their own cocktail with value-added features," he said. "That's hard to do without a degree of standardization that isn't quite there yet with S.100 and H.100, and there is room for something else [like MSP] in the middle."

The type of standardization attempted by MSP "is a direction the industry will go," Marchant said, "and especially from a technical point of view, it's a really good thing. But they really haven't cracked the business problem yet. Until they can get some of the heavier weights in the industry to sign up, it will be tough for the end user to see a specific benefit."

The Commetrex PCI board, dubbed the MSP/CX, sports two Texas Instruments TMS320C6201 chips and also packs an Intel386 EX coprocessor running the QNX/Neutrino real-time operating system. That OS, according to a Commetrex spokesman, "provides the robust user-to-user memory protection required for the MSP's multi-vendor environment." The board, claimed to be one of the first PCI boards to incorporate H.100, will be available by the middle of this year. It can support "media-processing capacities of over 30 G.723 audio streams, speech recognition, or V.34+ modems in any combination, and hundreds of ADPCM voice ports can be implemented," Lippman said.

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