Interoperability push Voice-over-Internet market drives DataBeam, Intel partnership

A partnership between Intel Corp. and a developer of real-time Internet collaboration software could accelerate Internet telephony's penetration into the business market.

Intel has reached an agreement with Lexington, Ky.-based DataBeam Corp. to pool resources so the two companies can quickly offer voice and video products based on the H.323 standard. The standard deals with voice and video communications over packet-switched networks, such as the Internet and corporate local area networks, and will let users of different telecommunications products avoid software incompatibilities.

Under the agreement, DataBeam will furnish tools to industry equipment and software providers, starting in the first quarter of 1997, using core H.323 components licensed from Intel. These components will be incorporated into cross-platform developer toolkits, which will include application program interfaces, interoperability test harnesses and extensive customer support.

"We're going to be responsible for getting people up and running using this technology," said David Panos, vice president of marketing for DataBeam. "We're going to deal with the thorny issues of making this technology work in the wild and wooly environment that users are being forced to work in.

Intel's portion of the agreement will involve "bringing the technology to the core PC platform," said David Nash, Intel's product manager for Internet software. "We want to make sure that people who are creating with these tools and using the Intel chip will be able to create products that can give them the results they expect without a lot of work at the desktop.

The two companies will target third-party developers and work to support OEMs, with the goal of helping to bring a range of interoperable communications products to market quickly.

"Job one is going to be ensuring interoperability, or else the market is going to fragment and Internet telephony will become another one of those non-starter technologies," said Nash.

The two companies will also collaborate on marketing the tool set to customers, with DataBeam focusing on its traditional telecommunications vendor customers, including makers of servers, LAN-WAN gateways and remote access devices. The partnership is looking at the carrier market as a secondary target until carriers begin offering Internet voice services, Panos said.

"It's going to take a very complete solution and a very high degree of interoperability for the carriers to start offering these services," said Panos. "We're going to try to encourage that, and the carriers will know that there will be some pretty big players supporting the OEMs from both our computer telephony space and Intel's architecture space.

"We're going to try to take care of the end points, but this market will also require that the network gets its act together," said Nash. "All the interests involved in Internet telephony are going to have to work to get it to the point where people will expect it to be there for them, just like the dial tone is now.

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