The Latest In Developer Resource Blades: Page 4 of 27

This powerful and sweeping notion previsions today's "exploded" view of the converged enhanced service platform, where a "softswitching" facility connects resources encapsulated (and individually scaled as application requirements warrant) within discrete gateway, proxy, media and application servers.

An entire generation of middleware - most notably Dialogic's SCSA and CT Media initiatives (now further evolved by Intel, and referred to as Converged Communications Software) - was created to support resource abstraction, and the companion vision of application resource sharing: the idea that a single "CT server" could house multiple applications which would interoperate and exploit one another's specific functionalities.

Meanwhile, the ability to abstract and interconnect dispersed telephony resources encouraged development of a first generation of single-purpose, high-density boards for multi-T1/E1 interfacing and DSP processing.

Availability of such boards permitted the reasonably cost-effective integration of platforms to support applications with widely varying critical scale factors - for example, a CT-based PBX scaled to a traditional 1 trunk:4 stations rule of thumb, as opposed to a CT-based ACD with closer to 1:1 trunk/station scaling.

Both initiatives - toward better buses and higher levels of resource abstraction, on the one hand, and toward more comprehensive functionality and higher density, on the other - play important roles in defining today's state of the art.