Riding The Bus To Computer Telephony Solutions; Shipments of Industry-Standard SCbus Ports Pass Million Mark.

PARSIPPANY, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 7, 1996--SCbus, an important standard in the development of advanced computer telephony (CT) solutions, has passed a major milestone toward widespread industry adoption. Shipments of SCbus ports have passed the one million mark, which make it the industry's most widespread open bus standard for CT applications.

SCbus is the only standard of its kind adopted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which guarantees an open process for its maintenance and development. Since its submission for adoption in 1994, ANSI and VITA (the VME Industry Trade Association) have continued to consider enhancements to the specification, such as expanding its bandwidth to 4096 timeslots and enhancing fault tolerance.

The standard has gained broad industry acceptance since Dialogic initiated the multi-company effort in 1993, before ANSI's adoption. Since then, nearly half of the SCbus ports have been shipped by other technology and imbedded system suppliers. Today, more than 100 products are offered by more than 35 technology companies using silicon products by VLSI Technology Inc. and other independent integrated circuit suppliers.

SCbus provides a large-capacity distributed switch that connects multi-vendor plug-in boards. SCbus is used in call center switches, wireless enhanced services, one-number access, data transmission equipment, automatic speech recognition, text- to-speech, and other advanced computer telephony applications. Its flexibility enables switching and multimedia systems to scale easily from a few ports to thousands of ports.

"We support SCbus in our Alpha Server CT platforms for two primary reasons," added Bruce Cohen, director of CT marketing at Digital Equipment Corp., which deploys SCbus in a variety of wireless and wireline enhanced service applications and large call centers worldwide. "First, its large switching capability and extensive fault resilience are ideal for demanding wireless and wireline network applications. And second, extensive support for SCbus-based development tools and applications provides our customers with a wide variety of software options."

A survey in the June 1996 issue of Computer Telephony magazine revealed that more than three-fourths of the industry's leading toolkits for building advanced voice applications support the SCbus, nearly three times more than any other bus.

"By passing the million-port milestone, SCbus is recognized as the industry's most widespread hardware standard for computer telephony applications," said Susan Hardman, network product marketing manager for VLSI's Communications Product Group. "Its rapid growth rate is reinforced with its adoption by ANSI, which guarantees that the SCbus will remain an open standard with a long-term growth path."

Background Information

SCbus is a hardware element of the Signal Computing System Architecture (SCSA) standard. SCSA, initiated by 70 companies in March 1993, is a set of specifications for creating open, multi- vendor, multi-application computer telephony systems. Its elements -- drawn from industry forums such as the Enterprise Computer Telephony Forum (ECTF), standards bodies such as ANSI, and defacto standards such as TAPI and TSAPI -- form a complete hardware and software architecture that integrates telephony into the open computing environment. Today, SCSA is supported by more than 300 leading companies in telecommunications, computing and computer telephony.

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CONTACT: Rosabel Tao

Fleishman-Hillard, Inc.

415-356-1013

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