Basking Ridge, New Jersey-based Lucent Technologies Inc has followed through on its March promise (CI No 2,869) to enhance the capabilities of its Definity Enterprise Communications Server, and has also announced the first fruits of its strategic alliance with Bay Networks Inc (CI No 2,956). New for the Definity ECS – the company’s integrated voice-video-data switching system – is an Asynchronous Transfer Mode, ATM concentrator, the nET90, which is designed to enable users to integrate voice over their ATM networks. The nET90 is said to enable the full bandwidth of the Definity ECS’s T1/E1 interface to be used to route traffic to the ATM network. To increase the Definity ECS’s ability to traverse the wide area, Lucent has also added two new switch modules: the first of these is claimed to allow users to place a switch module up to 22 miles from the Definity ECS using single-mode fiber transceivers – the previous maximum was five miles – and the second uses up to four T1/E1 connections to enable a module to be up to 3,500 miles from a central site; formerly the limit was 100 miles. For the future, Lucent is enhancing its support for the Q.932 signaling standard, which is designed to enable different vendors’ switches to interoperate. The company plans to add some optional features of Q.932, such as the ability to display whether calls are being redirected because of a busy line, or giving no response. On the management side, a new software module dubbed Terranova ECS Station Administration has been launched. The Microsoft Corp Windows-based product is designed to allow network administrators to control telephone stations from a single personal computer console. Features are said to include the ability to add, change or remove stations; schedule translations for the Definity ECS; and create templates and pre-printed labels. It is due to ship at the end of the month for $2,900; the company is not revealing pricing or availability information for the other new p roducts. The first result from the Bay-Lucent alliance is a network management offering, which will ship from Bay as part of the 7.1 release of its Optivity network management system, and from Lucent as the OneVision Enterprise Network Management Offer. The new system is designed to manage and monitor the Definity ECS, and Bay’s switches, hubs and routers from a single console. The offering is basically a combination of Bay’s Optivity Enterprise, with Lucent’s Definity network management software: key features are said to include integrated device discovery; inventory; fault correlation; and integration of the Definity ECS management application from within the Optivity Enterprise application suite. It is due to ship in November, but there is no word on pricing.
