What Does the Future Hold?
When we discuss the future of AVVID, it is useful to examine where we are and
how we got here. Over the past few years, this technology has grown by leaps
and bounds.Advances have been made in every area, with new offerings coming
out almost every day.
An area that will definitely be enhanced further will be the CallManager
platform. In version 2.x organizations were limited to 200 IP telephones per
server.When 3.0 debuted, this number went up to 2500 with support for 10,000
IP phones within a cluster.With the latest release, 3.1, we can now support up to
1,000,000 IP telephones. I would expect that this number will continue to rise
with the later revisions of the software. As this technology gains further acceptance,
we can also probably expect to see several enhancements to the
CallManager feature offering, such as a voice-recording system. I would also
expect to see support specifically for call centers. IOS-based versions of the
CallManager platform are already available; although these currently provide a
very limited feature set, future revisions will most likely contain more features
and open IP telephony solutions up for branch offices.
Aside from CallManager, I would also expect that we will see further software
developments and new packages from both Cisco and other vendors. A good
example would be the Intelligent Contact Management (ICM) suite, due to be
released in the first part of 2002. It is a software solution used for the direction
and relay of customer contact information between resources.This system will
utilize a set of user-defined roles in order to route voice,WWW, and e-mail correspondence
to the appropriate system or resource.This and other systems of its
kind will further enhance and augment the IP telephony and AVVID solutions.
Another area we will likely see growth is with the offering of pizza box
solutions.These products derive their colorful name from their small form-factor,
which is about the size of a pizza box.These are integrated all-in-one access solutions
that provide capabilities such as routing, switching, and voice-gateway services.
A good example of this type of solution would be the IAD1101 integrated
www.syngress.com
SONET, or Gigabit Ethernet. Products found at this layer are
typically high-end routers such as the 7500, or Layer 3
switching devices like the 12000 Gigabit Switch Router (GSR).
Concerning IP telephony, we would probably not see much
here, as it should be implemented at the lower levels.
New World Technologies • Chapter 2 59
access device.This solution offers two T1 ports, a v.35 port, a 10bastT Ethernet
port and an RS-232 port. Eight analog ports are also available via an expansion
slot.This type of solution offers several capabilities of the larger scale platforms at
a fraction of the cost.
At the client end, I would expect to see a third generation of IP telephones
offering wider support for the SIP protocol as well as other features, and maybe
eventually integrating with a video endpoint device, although Cisco has not
made any indication of this.
Without our standard-issue crystal ball, we cannot be certain as to what the
future holds, but if past performance is any indication, I would expect we will
continue to see rapid development of exciting products and services. Perhaps IP
telephony will one day replace our existing telephone infrastructure. Only time
will tell.