Today, NET made a small but very interesting announcement. It came across as a minor software revision, but actually packs quite a bit of news. I wrote about NET’s VX Series last month in Making OCS Smarter. In Office Communication Server (OCS) deployments, a gateway is required for interconnection to PSTN circuits. But NET has now added so much functionality to their gateway, that it even makes sense in pure SIP environment as well. This gateway product just got better with this newest release of software called VXe. The software applies to all NET VX Series gateways which are frequently used and optimized for Microsoft OCS implementations.

The VXe release is NET’s own extension of the Microsoft Interoperability specification. This qualification program for SIP/PSTN Gateways, IP-PBXs and SIP trunking services ensures a seamless customer experience with setup, support, and use of qualified telephony infrastructure with OCS 2007 R2.

What is significant about this release is now the NET VXe series can reduce the total number of servers required in OCS networks. This lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) of OCS projects by reducing server requirements and management costs; thus an even faster ROI. It is especially going to change the economics for branch office locations. But all users of OCS 2007 R2 (and those considering it) need to take a good look at these gateways.

NET extended OCS capabilities to the gateway. I really like this concept because the OCS cloud normally ends at the Mediation server. VXe extends OCS capabilities to the gateway; or enables the gateway to communicate directly with the OCS front-end servers. That is the meat of this VXe announcement – a gateway that natively extends OCS.

This is particularly valuable in branch offices where there may not be any on-site OCS servers planned. In a centralized OCS deployment, a branch office can’t utilize local trunks because codec translation is required to make/receive calls from the local trunk. The VXe solves this by with native codec transcoding. This is a highly cost effective way to add local trunking to branch offices. Another example of how VXe extends OCS is with Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring. OCS normally monitors the Quality of Experience up to the mediation server.  With VXe, that monitoring is extended all the way to the gateway. That can be a short or a long distance in the case of a remote branch office.

There are multiple benefits associated with built-in support of the RT audio codec. This means that instead of using the OCS infrastructure to translate the audio streams, that instead the gateway itself can translate them directly to the required format (PSTN, SIP). This moves the translation chore from software to hardware while simultaneously opening up more network routes since the NET VX Series supports so many natively (PSTN, ITSP, multiple SIP carriers, etc.). It also delivers improved options for survivability should the primary SIP path fail. The gateway is also capable of encrypting the audio with STTP and TLS.

Regarding survivability, VXe includes the ability to cache Active Directory information. The gateways can route calls based on the stored information resulting with increased simplicity, reduced latency, and improved survivability. If an outage on the network disrupts communications to the AD server, the call will still be completed.

Even better, if a disruption blocks the path to the called destination, the gateway can use the alternate entry to route the call over the PSTN.

Most of us are waiting for Wave 14 to see increased features and capabilities. VXe doesn’t change that, but gives us something new while we are waiting. It is interesting to see the OCS world mature with so much more flexibility and features. The key with any enterprise voice design is versatility to accommodate all kinds of situations.

This new gateway capability offers lots of new capabilities and cost saving opportunities.

[Editor’s Note: This post originally written by Dave Michaels at our partner blog UC Strategies, and is reposted with permission. –mrh]