VoIP links Intel, Siemens

Colorado Springs, Colo. -- Intel Corp. will directly collaborate with Siemens Communications in porting voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications, it was announced last week. Garry Reichert, vice president of global alliances and business development at Siemens, said the first results will offer applications for Siemens' HiPath 8000 soft switch and OpenScape software suite for HiPath and for Intel's carrier-class rack-mounted servers.

The agreement, which covers enterprise communications but may find service provider applications, follows a similar Intel-Siemens R&D pact in May covering desktops. Areas of research include wireless security, personal portals, unified real-time communications and integrated voice/video communications. As such, the R&D goes beyond standalone enterprise VoIP applications to unified communications based on IP.

Reichert said certain vertical market sectors, such as digital health care, will be emphasized in the early demonstrations of joint technology, and the vertical markets served may partially determine the third-party independent software vendors that Intel and Siemens work with. Both Intel and Siemens will work on optimizing the OpenScape software to allow for better scaling to larger systems, and to offer more performance headroom for a given class of processor.

Reichert said the companies plan to follow the work of such standards bodies and forums as the Internet Engineering Task Force, Parlay Group, Multiservice Forum, 3G Partnership Project and SIP Forum. It is possible that they will make joint proposals to standards bodies, but in any event, they will follow emerging standards in realms such as IP Multimedia Subsystems.