Fusion gives vendors little to worry about Trio of Internet product developers lines up behind Natural MicroSystems platform

Three companies, including Lucent Technologies, have tapped an integrated platform for Internet telephony to deliver voice and fax services for Internet products.

Natural MicroSystems Corp.'s Fusion, a hardware and software platform designed for companies creating Internet telephony applications, will be incorporated into new products from Lucent, Netiphone and Inter-Tel for call center and Internet telephony gateway applications.

"The Fusion platform was intended from the start to be scalable and to provide high performance," said Mike Katz, director of Internet telephony products at Natick, Mass.-based Natural MicroSystems. "Developers building applications for Internet telephony need a platform that allows them to focus on adding value and bringing products to market quickly, instead of worrying about the architecture of the platform.

Lucent will build the technology into its Multi Media Communications eXchange family of call centers so that Internet surfers can use a single telephone line to speak with an agent to place orders or ask questions while browsing the Internet.

Inter-Tel will use the Fusion platform to create an Internet telephony gateway, the Vocal 'Net Server, targeted at the business market. The 'Net Server will allow business users to place calls from office TCP/IP networks over the public network to help cut long-distance costs.

Netiphone is targeting alternative long-distance markets, call centers and Internet service providers that are offering Internet telephony with its Internet Telephony Gateway server products. The company's server is designed to handle calls made from computers to regular phones, from regular phones to computers and from phones to phones-all using the Internet for transmission.

"By signing on with Natural MicroSystems, we can focus on the things we do well," said Mike Vargo, vice president of engineering at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Netiphone. "We put together complete systems by taking raw technology and turning it into something deployable, and Fusion is a great component for making that happen quickly.

"We required a solution that could offer performance, scalability and minimum host load," said Jeff Ford, vice president of Software Development at Inter-Tel. "Fusion meets all our requirements and allows us to focus our efforts on designing the application.

The Fusion architecture is based on moving work from host computers to the high-speed boards of the platform itself, which helps reduce delay and improve sound quality, enabling the platform to scale up or down quickly.

"We wanted to address the concerns of real-time conversations over large-scale networks," said Katz. "As a result of that thinking, we've actually moved toward becoming a part of the infrastructure.

The high density of the platform itself makes it a more cost-effective and scalable product, he said.

"You can get a large number of ports in a small platform," Vargo said. "That makes the platform very scalable, and that was a major factor in our decision to use it.

The Fusion platform comprises a series of tightly integrated PC board products and Windows NT-based APIs. The system complies with the H.323 standard for voice and video and was designed to be programmable to let users add support for new Internet telephony functions and standards as they evolve.