VON: Convedia advances customer base

SAN JOSE--Canadian service provider Telus said today that it will use Convedia’s media servers for IP media processing in its IP-One Innovation Internet telephony services for business customers. Convedia will support IP Centrex and VoIP teleconferencing initially, but the deal has the potential for supporting additional services in the future.

Convedia’s CMS-6000 is a carrier-class media server that provides the media processing muscle required for existing and emerging high-margin enhanced services such as multimedia conferencing, IP Centrex, unified messaging, video mail, ringback tones, network gaming and speech portals.

The company’s smaller unit, the CMS-1000 is an entry-level media server optimized for smaller service providers, large enterprise, and network edge deployments. “We are a service-enabling platform that is not application-specific, so we can consolidate up to a dozen network elements into one device,” said Grant Henderson, co-founder and executive vice president of marketing and strategy for Convedia.

Convedia also announced this week a joint effort to advance the standardization of Media Server Markup Language (MSML). The language has been free of intellectual property rights since being submitted by Convedia to the IETF in 2003.

“We introduced MSML to the IETF without claims of IPR because we wanted the industry to rally around it,” Henderson said.

So far the industry has. “It is now the most broadly embraced media server [protocol] in the world. We think the validation by NMS Communications, Intel and at least 30 other companies will give it legs to move to an RFC in the IETF,” Henderson said.

MSML is used along with the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to provide comprehensive and standards-based control of IP media servers when deployed in VoIP and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) networks. Convedia uses MSML as a control interface for its media servers.

Based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), MSML provides a common language that can be implemented by all application and media server vendors for simpler integration and broader solution interoperability. MSML enables SIP application developers to control the voice, video, and multimedia-processing capabilities provided by IP media servers.