Hewlett-Packard and Cisco last week broadened an existing partnership in enterprise-networking and Internet-related technologies to cover an architecture the companies call the SS7/IP OpenCall Multiservice Controller. It will be situated in the central office and will combine elements of HP's OpenCall architecture and Cisco's Internetworking Operating System.

Bernard Guidon, general manager of HP's telecom business unit, said that the OpenCall controllers will be unique in function but that the systems will likely resemble the master "gatekeeper" controllers specified in Level 3 Communications' IP Device Control (IPDC) proposals, as well as in Bellcore's Simple Gateway Control Protocol (SGCP).

Don Listwin, executive vice president of Cisco's service-provider and consumer lines, noted that Cisco was an early partner with Bellcore on the SGCP development project and that Cisco has expanded its telephone-integration development efforts with Bellcore via a deal announced Oct. 26. As IPDC and SGCP are combined into a Master Gateway Control Protocol, Cisco and HP are sure to follow that standard, Listwin said. Indeed, the controller architecture will be built on a suite of open application programming interfaces.

Meanwhile, Nortel Networks, formed via the recent merger of Northern Telecom and Bay Networks, can be expected to follow with its own architectural effort soon, and the company believes MGCP will be critical to bringing together the worlds of voice and data. Indeed, the definition of MGCP in mid-October was a milestone in telephony and Internet Protocol integration, said Al Bender, vice president and general manager of voice-over-IP network solutions at Nortel's public carrier networks group (Research Triangle Park, N.C).

"The adoption of MGCP means terminating calls at Layer 2, and many in the IP community do not yet understand the significance," Bender said. "Simply put, H.323 [the IP conferencing protocol] is dead. It has been replaced by MGCP."

Before the merger, Bay already was working on VoIP hardware to enable voice access over IP backbones and had begun selling large-carrier IP-access systems to Internet-service-provider and small-carrier accounts. Bay brought routing-protocol expertise and hardware support for quality-of-service parameters to the merger.

Nortel "had many partnerships in QoS but didn't have the hardware systems behind the concepts," Bender said. "The merger gives us a full suite for both IP and circuit-switching access."

Nortel's investment in tera-router technology from Avici Systems Inc., combined with the high-end Versalar access platforms from Bay, give the company broadband-router technology that can be combined with Nortel's own wave-division multiplexing optical interfaces.

"The vision we're driving isn't just voice-over-IP but the convergence of all traffic into a single packet-based infrastructure," Bender said. "We're using technology from Aptis Communications as the basis for a third-generation gateway technology which will serve as a true dial-access platform for packets."