IP Unity Announces Upgrade of Harmony6000 Version 2.0

MILPITAS, CA - IP Unity Corp., the provider of carrier grade media server platforms for enhanced voice and video applications, announced the general availability of Harmony6000 2.0, featuring VoiceXML 2.0 and SIP capabilities. Service providers can utilize VoiceXML to create, modify and differentiate voice services for various market segments and customers. The new technology offered by IP Unity is in line with the migration of carrier business models moving from offering standardized mass-market voice products to customized niche services. "VoiceXML and media servers allow carriers to give each customer a unique product made exactly the way they like it," said Brett Azuma, senior vice president of marketing for IP Unity. "This is an exciting and profitable departure from the past, where limitations in the technology forced service providers to compete with an undifferentiated product to their mass markets." With the addition of VoiceXML 2.0 on the media server platform, developers can create voice and multimedia applications using standard development tools. Carriers can offer corporate customers a customized look and feel for business applications such as web-enabled conferencing or unified messaging, without incurring heavy development costs. SIP and VXML are emerging as important protocols for multimedia applications, and their addition to the platform extends the power of the Harmony6000 Media Server platform to a broader community of independent application developers. "With a string of high profile deployments such as Comcast and Liberty Media, IP Unity has been one of the most successful pioneers in the media server category," said Marc Beattie, senior analyst and partner with Wainhouse Research. "Within the US, the cable market has been an early leader provisioning enhanced voice and data services, and additionally we have begun to see new deployments in Asia. We expect the enhanced services market to continue to grow briskly over the next few years, and the addition of SIP and VoiceXML to IP Unity's media server platform makes it a natural choice for service providers, ASPs and carriers." Other improvements to the Harmony6000 with this release include: -- Speech capabilities - speech recognition software has been integrated into the Harmony6000 Media Server blade providing carriers and large enterprises with a scalable and solution for voice recognition. Tightly integrating speech recognition into the media server enables carriers and service providers to offer speech applications that require intensive processing, and allows end users to interact with applications such as auto attendant and voice browsers using natural language. Wireless operators catering to users in eye-busy or hand-busy situations will benefit from leveraging voice recognition capabilities on the carrier-grade platform. -- Packet Cable security: The newly enhanced Harmony6000 enables the implementation of encryption algorithms and Security Mechanisms (IPSec, IKE, PKINIT). These mechanisms counter the threat of unauthorized access to text data and passwords, prevent impersonators from gaining unauthorized access to data or creating unauthorized emails, and foil denial of service attacks, encryption key thefts and protocol attacks. -- Partitioning: Harmony6000 2.0 can be dynamically partitioned, allowing the media processing resources to be divided between multiple applications and/or multiple organizations, down to the group level. Further, dynamic partitioning allows for more efficient resource utilization without impacting availability, a feature particularly attractive to carriers offering multiple services from a single media server platform. -- Multiple language support: With this latest release, the media server operating environment can be converted to any language, including two-byte languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.