Siemens Stromberg-Carlson Inc, the division of Siemens AG that manufactures public telephone exchanges, has gone to Boca Raton, Florida-based NetSpeak Corp for a joint development partnership concentrating on Internet protocol based telephony services on telecommunications equipment. Parent company Siemens AG last week announced a joint marketing and development agreement for voice and data networks with 3Com Corp (CI No 3,200), and made an agreement last month with US Robotics to develop voice over IP remote access hardware(CI No 3178). 3Com Corp, however, insisted that Siemens had not reneged on the deal, claiming that Internet telephony, even though it involves voice transport over IP networks, is a different market to the corporate network systems it is working on with Siemens, with different markets and a different set of technological considerations. The Siemens group of companies around the world are an independent lot, and the Internet Solutions Business Unit of Siemens Stomberg-Carlson Inc, also based in Boca Raton, Florida, has rebelled before. Last year it went to Sun Microsystems Inc for the server hardware it needed rather than wait for sister company Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG to come up with the goods (CI No 3,067). NetSpeak is emerging as a major player in the immature IP telephony market, having already signed deals with Fujitsu Ltd and Rockwell International Corp. It develops business quality IP telephony products, including the WebPhone Windows Internet telephone, which enables full duplex encrypted point-to-point voice communications over any IP network. Siemens Stromberg is interested in NetSpeak’s telephone gateway server software, which will enable it to build a hardware and software gateway that can manage the setup of voice over IP, and handle account management and billing. Siemens and NetSpeak believe that the market for their Internet Telephony Gateways will be with telecommunications companies, cable operators, and Internet service providers.
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