Intriguing Applications Converged business communications on a single chip

In today’s economy, small businesses face the twin imperatives of reducing costs and improving productivity within limited budgets.

The variety of different systems connecting the phone, Internet, intranet, email, web, and other communications applications can drive up the cost of business communications.

This is a problem that developers are addressing with a new generation of converged communications solutions specifically designed to meet the needs of small and medium businesses (SMBs). These versatile systems can be designed to support a broad range of IP-based services and functions:

• File servers—including email server, data security, Intel® RAID, and USB
• Networking—including wireless networking, switching, and routing
• Security—firewall and VPN services
• Telephony—including IP-PBX devices, remote phones, soft-phones, auto attendant FXO/FXS, and T1/E1 equipment

Why it’s a game changer

SMBs are especially interested in low-cost, easy to manage systems that can support a variety of services such as routing and switching, voicemail, multi-way conferencing, and security, in addition to traditional IP-PBX capabilities. With a foundation in Internet protocols, session initialization protocol (SIP) allows integration of traditional voice communications with Web-based data services.

An IP-PBX platform based on Intel® architecture can now provide integrated IP-based communications for the entire small business. A single system can concurrently support multiple SIP endpoint devices with a simple failover mechanism that can be incorporated a second standby system designed to deliver ‘five-nines’ (99.999 percent uptime) availability.

Such a converged solution must combine high-performance voice processing, packet processing, and security acceleration capabilities. Meeting these diverse requirements traditionally required several chips: a dedicated digital signal processor (DSP), a CPU to run Voice over IP (VoIP) services and applications, and a network processor to manage packet-based data streams.

The Intel® EP80579 Integrated Processor with Intel® QuickAssist Technology is a system-on-a-chip (SOC) that consolidates the functions of multiple chips onto a single device. Integrated functional units include security acceleration, packet processing, TDM interfaces for analog (FXO/FXS), and digital (T1/E1) connectivity. DSP algorithms execute directly on the Intel® architecture core with enough headroom for customer applications. Combining all these elements with Intel architecture makes this solution ideal for a modular, small-form-factor converged IP-PBX.

What’s so intelligent about it?

By converging all networking and communications onto a single device based on embedded Intel architecture, it is now possible for IP-PBX developers to deliver a software-based solution that can be easily managed and scaled over time.

The bottom-line results include lower costs to support and administer the network, as well as lower connection costs for voice transport through VoIP service providers. Instead of multiple networks separating voice and data, with resulting support costs for each network, it is now possible to drive voice and data through an all-IP-based network, essentially retiring legacy analog-based TDM voice infrastructure, and it’s associated PBX or key system.

Once a business implements such a converged IP-based communications network, unified messaging, firewalls, gateway, and email services become less costly to provision, manage, and support.