GEC Plessey Telecommunications Ltd has realised the way the wind is blowing and is repositioning its iSDX PABX as a platform for major application development. The new generation of machines, the first of which were launched on Friday, are based on Motorola Inc’s 88000 RISC processors. At the same time the company announced its Open Communication Architecture, with which it intends to support Novell Inc’s Telephony Services for NetWare Application Programming Interfaces and Microsoft Corp’s similar Telephony Application Programming Interface effort. The company says that all existing iSDX installations can be upgraded to the new RISC processors. Though the new hardware is the first plank in the strategy, most of the rest, such as the aforementioned APIs will not appear until 1995. At that time the company is also promising a open Ethernet interface direct to the RISC processor for extending Computer Supported Telephony Applications across the business. In the mean time the faster procesors will be put to work handling cordless traffic – GEC Plessey has built in support for CT-2 cordless extensions for the first time, each switch can handle up to 48 base stations and 500 mobile users. The new exchanges boast also standard European Basic Rate ISDN support for the first time and can aggregate multiple basic rate connections into high speed connections – useful for local network linking, video conferencing and the like. Given that the Motorola RISC family appears to have a somewhat attenuated life as the Schaumberg, Illinois company moves all its development effort over to PowerPC, the choice of chip looks somewhat odd: however it is clearly the one to which GEC Plessey is wedded – three years ago, we published details of its plans for the System X public telephone exchange, which involved replacing the current proprietary processor (derived from the old GEC Mark II BL) with the 88000, and adopting the Chorus Systemes SA Unix microkernel as the operating environment (CI No 1,357): it declined to give an update on that project on grounds of commercial confidentiality, but now that the 88000 has popped up in the iSDX, the implication is that the System X project is proceeding as planned.
