Creating a development craze: Elemedia builds two servers with others in mind

Looking to create more services for voice-over-IP providers, elemedia, a Lucent Technologies venture, last week unveiled two programmable server products. The company demonstrated the servers at pulver.com's Voice on the Net conference in Atlanta.

Elemedia's media server will allow service providers to deliver enhanced features, such as call screening, collect calling, message recording/playback and conferencing. The media server is protocol-agnostic and will work with other companies' products, which is important in today's environment, said Joe Mele, president of elemedia.

"People want flexibility," said Mele. "If we build a server that only works with Lucent's Softswitch, it wouldn't go over well in the community."

Elemedia also introduced a session initiation protocol (SIP) server based on Lucent's Softswitch. The server supports standard SIP services and personal mobility, call forwarding and time-of-day routing. The adoption by elemedia of the scalable SIP is indicative of the move away from the H.323 standard, said Jeff Pulver, president and CEO of pulver.com."People have come to the realization that H.323 does not belong in a central office," he said.

Both servers use Lucent's Softswitch application programming interfaces (APIs), which simplify the development of new services."

"By introducing these products, it will get third-party developers excited," Mele said. "I compare what is happening today to what happened 20 years ago with computers."

Frontier Communications, which will begin testing the product in December, views the open APIs as essential to creating new services. "We see the APIs as something that allows us to drop [new services] into the server faster or go to third-party providers without having to rely on Lucent or elemedia," said Marvin Hutchens, chief engineering officer at Frontier.

After completing beta tests, the company will begin a controlled rollout of the servers in March 2000.