Continuous Computing Merges Products in Trillium+plus
By Rik Turner, Datamonitor Computerwire - May 20, 2005 edition
Continuous Computing Corporation, a developer of CompactPCI and AdvancedCTA line cards and comms protocol stacks sold as source code, has united its two product lines into a third, in which stacks are available as binary code on cards.
The hardware business, selling the line cards into telecoms equipment manufacturers for functions such as processing, switching and I/O, is where San Diego, California-based Continuous Computing started out in 1998.
It entered the software market in 2003 with its acquisition of the Trillium division of control-pane software for network components from Intel Corp, which also became a major investor in the privately held company.
That gave it a series of protocol stacks for cellular telephony (2, 2.5 and 3G), VoIP, SS7 and SIGTRAN (which enables SS7 signaling over IP networks). Until now, said Neeraj Patel, director of product marketing, the hard- and software lines of business have been conducted as two separate business units.
Now, however, the Trillium+plus product line brings the two together as a third portfolio, complementing rather than replacing the first two. The first two products out of the door is Trillium+plus SS7 and Trillium+plus ISDN User Signaling (ISUP), the latter enabling features such as ringback tones and missed call alerts.
Then "in the next couple of quarters," Continuous Computing will add products for SS7/SIGTRAN, MAP (Mobile Application Part), CAP (CAMEL Application Part), INAP (Intelligent Network Application Part) and IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem).
A MAP stack is important for things like local number portability and Home Location Register (HLR) information access. The SS7/SIGTRAN or Signaling Gateway is used within a fixed-line IP network (now commonly referred to as a Next-Gen Network of NGN) for conversations between softswitches and media gateways, while INAP is the standard interface for Intelligent Networks (IN), used for communications between applications.
IMS is, in essence, "a SIP server for wireless networks," Patel explained, adding that "we already have a SIP stack, but there are extensions needed in order to use SIP signalling in a wireless domain."
It is effectively the IP backbone for a 3G network, and it can be a single or multiple boxes, combining the functions of Home Subscriber Server (HLS for the IMS world), Call State Control Function (CSCF), Media Gateway Control Function (MGCF), the interface into the Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN) and the Application Broker, which uses a SIP interface into the APIs used by the various applications on the network (PARLAY, XML and CAP, for instance).
Patel said Continuous Computing is looking at the IMS product for the Trillium+plus portfolio for launching in mid-2006, noting that the company is in a wait-and-see mode with regard to the final definition of the spec, which may include all or only part of the elements mentioned above, with others sitting outside the IMS.
IMS is, of course, specific to the WCDMA (i.e. GSM) world, with a counterpart for the CDMA part of the planet is MMD, but there, Patel added, "we'll be able to put a SIP servers into an MMD network."
Continuous Computing's largest competitor on the Trillium protocol stack business is Hughes Software Systems (HSS), an Indian-based outfit now owned by Flextronics, "though even though don't have the breadth we do," Patel argued.
He estimated Continuous Computing's share of the licensed comms protocol stack market at 33%-35%, with HSS at around the same level, followed by smaller players such as Radvision Ltd from Israel and Data Connection Ltd (DCL) from the UK.
None of these companies have so far added a hardware component to their stacks, making them capable of more rapid integration into telecoms equipment, however, he went on
