Steve Liese, Director of Product Marketing at Carrius
Q. What is going on with Carrius?
A. As we continue to enhance the powerful feature set of our Compleat-200 Service Delivery Gateway, Carrius continues to enjoy exceptional market acceptance of the product. In the coming weeks, we will be announcing several new deployments of the Compleat-200 in various applications. We have recently announced new CCXML and VoiceXML functionality to make it useful to a broader set of speech solution developers.
Q. Speaking of the Service Delivery Gateway, can you elaborate on this new initiative?
A. The Service Delivery Gateway is not exactly a new initiative, rather it is a more descriptive name for the powerful functionality the Compleat-200 has always had. Previously, we referred to the product as an Intelligent VoIP Gateway. We felt like that name did not really describe everything that the product can do for enabling service delivery across multiple network types.
Q. What is the Compleat™-200, how does it work and what does it provide that you think other solutions are lacking?
A. The Compleat-200 consists of our Liberator software running on standard off-the-shelf hardware. The hardware provides basic circuit and packet media termination, and our Liberator software adds critical functions such as softswitch call control, carrier-grade redundancy, application control interfaces, and protocol translation.
Ordinary VoIP gateways and media gateways focus only on mediating between circuit or TDM networks and packet networks. They also have some element of softswitch call control integrated into them or at least support one of several media gateway control protocols so that a softswitch can control them. What they lack is adequate means for an application residing above them to control and provide services to the users of the networks they are mediating.
In the Compleat-200 SDG, we combine the most complete set of supported protocols with unsurpassed signaling protocol conversion and several options for application control. Using our built-in Liberator software protocol bridge, the SDG takes signaling information derived from virtually any in-band or out-of-band signaling protocol and abstracts it up to an application over a standard application control interface such as SIP or XML or the Carrius API.
Q. What benefits can your customers gain from this solution?
A. By abstracting signaling to the application layer, enhanced services solutions can be virtually network agnostic. When our solution developer customers use us for the network connectivity front end of their solutions, they can address more markets faster than they could if they developed their own connectivity functionality one network type at a time. So, they have a larger addressable market, and they do not have to invest in developing functionality that is not part of their core competency.
Q. What impact will this solution have on the development of speech technologies?
A. This does not directly impact the development of speech technologies, but it does allow speech technology companies to completely focus on speech technologies and eliminates the distraction of having to interface to multiple network types using multiple signaling protocols.
Q. How does VoIP impact the deployment of speech technologies? What impact can it have on the speech market?
A. VoIP impacts the deployment of speech technologies in a couple of ways. As the name clearly states, VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is the packetization of voice so it can be transported using Internet protocol. Without voice packetization, new IP-based media processing platforms would not have come into existence and new speech technologies that leverage these platforms would not be possible at all. This is clear.
In an ideal world, new speech applications would simply provide their services to 100 percent VoIP networks. The reality is that the deployment of VoIP in service provider and enterprise networks means that there is now a greater variety of circuit, packet, wireless, and wireline networks than ever in the past. VoIP actually has the potential to make it more difficult for enhanced speech and voice automation services to be economically viable from a development and deployment perspective. That is precisely why Carrius created the Service Delivery Gateway - to enable universal delivery of old and new services across all network types and to improve ROI.
Q. Any last thoughts?
A. We at Carrius are excited about the advancements in the speech industry and look forward to expanding the potential addressable market for speech solutions. We will continue to add support for new protocols and media types to ensure that solutions utilizing our SDG will work with the latest network technologies.
Steve Liese has 20 years of experience in the communications industry with vendors such as NEC America, Alcatel, and Rapid5 Networks. When he joined Carrius Technologies Inc. in 2004, he brought along his network experience and knowledge, and is responsible for outbound marketing efforts to the enhanced services and carrier markets. He holds a BSEE from the University of Notre Dame.