The Yankee Group Inc. predicted earlier this month that sales of PBXs will jump this year by 25 per cent over last year, to a total of 2,975,000. In addition, Tier-1 carriers will rush to adopt toll-grade IP telephony by the fourth quarter, thanks to the onset of new solutions that provide toll-quality VoIP, security, and traffic engineering services. Moreover, vendors will roll out VoIP security products in 2002, helping to coax leery CTOs to adopt the technology, according to the research firm. The Yankee Group also predicted that the number of VoIP phones in Canada will jump by more than 300 per cent over the year.
Nortel Networks Corp. has enhanced its subscriber management platform in an effort to offer service providers pre-packaged IP services. Nortel’s so-called Shasta Out-of-the-Box Services for its Shasta 5000 Broadband Services Node (BSN) packages service applications written to the BSN’s Service Delivery Interfaces (SDI). SDIs let service providers provision services from the BSN without having to integrate them onto the BSN platform, Nortel says. Out-of-the-Box Services include content-filtering services from Symantec Corp., order-fulfilment services from BroadJump Inc., and service management applications from Xacct. BroadJump’s ControlWorks and VirtualTruck applications let service providers offer real-time service provisioning by letting customers provision and pay for additional bandwidth only as needed to meet peak requirements, such as downloading a movie. See www.nortel.com for more details.
Softswitch vendor Convergent Networks Inc. has tapped the chairman of Avici Systems Inc. to be its president and CEO. Surya Panditi replaces John Thibault, who will continue to serve as chairman of Convergent. Panditi remains chairman of Avici as well. Convergent makes the ICS2000 broadband switch, ISCS signaling gateway and ICSX softswitch. These devices can be used to replace trunking switches, and local switches for voice and data traffic, using packet switching rather than circuit switching. The company is privately held.