Frontier blazes ahead with Pluris investment

Frontier Communications could gain greater control over its destiny with the announcement last week that its venture capital arm, Frontier Ventures, is investing $3 million in Pluris, a developer of multistage terabit routers for the Internet backbone.

Frontier's Global-Center unit, which has been one of the first to deploy technologies such as multiprotocol label switching, will partner with Pluris to develop and test the multistage terabit router, which Pluris plans to release in early 2000.

The Pluris terabit network router could enable Frontier and other service providers to reduce costs and management while still providing integrated communications services over the Internet. By taking part in the development of the router, "we can set priorities, and that [gives] us an advantage," said Jonathan Heiliger, senior vice president of Frontier Ventures. "As pioneers, what we will gain is being able to see it happen. We will guide development to provide our services sooner."

"If we didn't have this connection with Pluris, we'd have to deal with Cisco [Systems] or Lucent [Technologies], who are several months behind in converging technologies development," Heiliger said.

The privately held company's latest round of financing will give it a greater lead in the technology race, said Sam Halabi, vice president of marketing at Pluris. "The $41 million will last a while," he said, adding that the partnership with Frontier will "help us bring a product to market that meets the requirements of the service providers and telcos."

The investment also should not limit Pluris' ability to sell to other carriers, said MatSteinberg, director of transport and optical networking at RHK. "You've seen UUNet invest in Juniper, and Juniper is selling to other providers as well. So with that as a baseline, I don't see that this would [limit Pluris]."

The actual percentage Frontier owns is undisclosed, but its $3 million is part of $41 million raised overall by Pluris this round. Other new investors include Chase Capital Partners, Worldview Technology Partners and Deutsche Bank.

In a bid to challenge the voice market dominance of Nortel Networks and Lucent Technologies, Cisco Systems announced last week its launch of a new suite of IP phone networking products for the enterprise market.

The Cisco AVVID product set, revealed at the fall Computer Telephony Expo in New York, includes five components: IP infrastructure systems, including multilayered intelligent switches; routers and gate-ways that permit functions such as quality of service and network management; call processing platforms; converged applications, including unified messaging, contact management and collaboration applications; and IP-enabled phones, software-based phones and video clients.

An important part of the AVVID architecture is the Cisco media convergence server 7830, which is pre-installed with Cisco's call manager for basic call processing, signaling and connection to configured devices, including IP phones, software-based phones, voice-over-IP gateways, switches and routers.

AVVID also offers a new IP-based automatic call distribution system that integrates software from recent acquisition GeoTel with Cisco's voice-over-IP technology.

The AVVID product announcement is part of an initiative by Cisco to beef up its meager market share in voice networking.

Cisco is "one of two acknowledged leaders in packet infrastructure, but they have less than 1% of the phone networking market," said Terry Stemmons, an analyst at Tel-Analysis. "Data is the future, but voice isn't going away. With this announcement, Cisco is taking its first real cut at the voice industry."

Also at CT Expo, Hewlett-Packard debuted its NetServer CT platform, which incorporates prepaid calling card applications from software developer N-Soft. With hardware and software from Dialogic, the NetServer CT platform also supports interactive voice response, IP telephony and unified messaging.

Lucent announced that it has added advanced speech-enabled directory searching from Phonetic Systems to its suite of directory products for businesses. The new functionality can direct incoming calls automatically to the desired extension - including cellular phones that may not have access to a standard directory.