CISCO Presents Mr. Tim Peyton's Overview of VoXX, IP contact centers, & IP Telephony

Tuesday, February 27 at University of Dayton Campus, Dayton, Ohio No charge.    Please bring a friend.    Guests welcome. Please join us Tuesday night, February 27, 2001, at the University of Dayton. Go to O'Leary Auditorium in Miriam Hall. We'll begin at 7:30 pm. Bring a friend. by Bob Esch, Editor, The DataBus

At DMA's February General Meeting on Feb 27, Tim Peyton, Major Account Manager (NSP Ohio Valley), for Cisco Systems, Inc. will be presenting an overview on "AVVID, the Architecture for Voice, Video, and Integrated Data". The material will cover VoXX, IP contact centers, and IP telephony.

This promises to be an overview of a whole new world of voice communications; one which will be available to us all in the (near?) future. Come, bring your questions, join us for this free presentation at The University of Dayton and hear Mr. Peyton discuss the many exciting developments in this area.

Mr. Payton is an account manager on the Ohio Valley Network Service Provider team working with ISP's, CLEC's, AIP, ASP's, and Ohio telecommunications and cable companies. He works out of Cisco's Dublin, Ohio office. One of three Cisco target markets is that of Service Providers, i.e., companies that provide information services, including telecommunication carriers, Internet Service Providers, cable companies, and wireless communication providers.

A major multi-national company, Cisco sells its products in approximately 115 countries through a direct sales force; distributors; value-added resellers; and system integrators. Cisco has headquarters in San Jose, CA. It also has major operations in Research Triangle Park, NC, and Chelmsford, MA; as well more than 225 sales and support offices in 75 countries.

Cisco Systems is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Cisco's networking solutions connect people, computing devices and computer networks, allowing people to access or transfer information without regard to differences in time, place or type of computer system.

Cisco states they offer the industry's broadest range of hardware products used to form information networks or give people access to those networks. In contrast to many technology companies, Cisco does not take a rigid approach that favors one technology over the alternatives and imposes it on customers as the only answer.

If you work with, or have friends who are involved with or interested in Voice, Video and Integrated Data over the Internet, please invite them to come as your guests. This will be a real learning experience for you and them, on a topic that appeals to us all---seeing where we are now, and looking into the future.

VO = Voice Over (XX various); Internet Telephony. A category of hardware and software that enables people to use the "Internet" as the transmission medium for telephone calls. For users who have free, or fixed-price Internet access, Internet telephony software essentially provides free telephone calls anywhere in the world. To date, however, Internet "telephony" does not offer the same quality of telephone service as direct telephone connections.

There are many Internet telephony applications available. Some, like CoolTalk and NetMeeting, come bundled with popular "Web browsers". Others are "stand-alone" products. Internet telephony products are sometimes called IP telephony, Voice over the Internet (VOI) or Voice over IP (VOIP) products.

IP = Internet Protocol, pronounced as two separate letters. IP specifies the format of "packets", also called datagrams, and the addressing scheme. Most "networks" combine IP with a higher-level "protocol" called "Transport Control Protocol" (TCP) , which establishes a virtual connection between a destination and a source.

IP by itself is something like the postal system. It allows you to address a package and drop it in the system, but there's no direct link between you and the recipient. TCP/IP, on the other hand, establishes a connection between two "hosts" so that they can send messages back and forth for a period of time.

[ISP = Internet Service Provider, such as GEMAIR.]

[CLEC = (pronounced see-lek) A Competitive Local Exchange Carrier is a telephone company that competes with an Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC) such as a Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC), GTE, ALLNET, etc.]

[AIP = Application infrastructure providers (AIPs) have become an attractive option for venture capital dollars as investors begin to look more closely at the sometimes lengthy time-to-profitability curves of many ASPs.]

[ASP = Application Service Providers, companies that rent software over the Web.]

Bob Esch, Editor
The DataBus
eschb@dma.org