Internet telephony specialist VocalTec Ltd has renamed itself VocalTec Communications Ltd, to reflect its ambition to move from the consumer market into the corporate market. VocalTec originally launched its Internet phone client in 1995 (CI No 2,638), and now develops client-server Internet Telephony servers, gateways, telephone conferencing, and document sharing software. According to Elon Ganor, chairman and chief executive of VocalTec, the new name shows the change of strategy to driving the convergence of the Internet/intranet and the Public Switched Network. Herzliya, Israel-based VocalTec is releasing later this month its Atrium Conferencing package, which consists of three components, the VocalTec Conference server, the Forum server, and the Internet Conference Professional client version 2.1. The Forum and Conference server software offerings are broadly similar, conference is for Internet teleconferencing and file sharing, Forum for the same features over an intranet. Both can be run on the same system, a Sun Microsystems Inc Sparc workstation, running Solaris 2.4, with 64MB of RAM. The server requirements are steep because the Digital Signal Processing functions are emulated in software, rather than using dedicated hardware boards. The Conference client manages the voice, and document sharing is compatible with Microsoft Corp’s OLE 2.0, thus enabling the sharing of Microsoft Office documents. A 10 user license for Conference client with both server licenses costs $2,400, one server can support 150 calls, and each call uses 10Kbps of bandwidth, thus needing a full T1/E1 Internet connection to support the full number of users. To enable normal telephone users to participate in personal computer-based conference calls, VocalTec’s Telephony Gateway server, there is an eight line PBX alternative which runs the Telephony Gateway software on a Pentium 200Mhz under Windows NT, using four of Dialogic Inc’s voice processing boards(CI No 3058). It routes calls over the Internet to another Telephone Gateway, or acts as a re-director, taking in-coming calls and directing them over the Internet. VocalTec, although it offers video features on its current release of Internet phone, is unprepared to commit to any schedule of integration of video conferencing into Atrium. VocalTec has been making a consistent quarterly loss since July 1996, which it attributes to the growth and development of its products and sales channels. It predicts a huge upturn in the Internet Telephony business in the next two to five years, and believes that it will now be profitable within one year.
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