SnowShore Develops New Standard for IP-Enhanced Conferencing & SIP Services; Endorsements by Telecom Leaders Highlights Steady Adoption Throughout Industry.Business Editors/High-Tech Writers CHELMSFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 8, 2003 Media Server Markup Language markup language Standard text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship among its parts. The most widely used markup languages are SGML, HTML, and XML. Embraced by Industry for SIP Enhanced Conferencing; SnowShore Offers Royalty-Free Usage to Drive the Industry's Adoption of Open, Flexible Service Applications & Features SnowShore Networks, a leading provider of IP services infrastructure for wireline, wireless and broadband networks  This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone and/or spelling.You can assist by [ editing it] now. , today officially introduced the application development and control protocol - media server control markup language (MSCML MSCML Media Server Control Markup Language ) - to the telecommunications industry. The protocol, which the company created in 2000 and submitted to the IETF See Internet Engineering Task Force. IETF - Internet Engineering Task Force as an Internet Draft Internet Drafts (or I-Ds) is a series of working documents published by the IETF. Typically, they are drafts for RFCs, but may be other works in progress not intended for publication as RFCs. in 2002 after a rigorous two year test and evaluation process, is used to drive the delivery of IP enhanced conferencing to wireline, wireless and broadband networks worldwide. SnowShore also announced the successful deployment of MSCML in both trials and live network environments by a number of leading telecommunications vendors, applications developers and service providers worldwide. "Z-Tel has found that using the MSCML standard, based on XML XML in full Extensible Markup Language. Markup language developed to be a simplified and more structural version of SGML. It incorporates features of HTML (e.g., hypertext linking), but is designed to overcome some of HTML's limitations. document type definitions, is ideal for application call control for IP services, especially in the area of conferencing," notes Jim Kitchen of Z-Tel, Senior VP of Network Strategy. Open and Standardized As part of its ongoing drive to fuel the growth of innovative services, SnowShore has stated to the IETF that it is offering Royalty Free licenses of its intellectual property necessary for implementing the MSCML standard. This inclusive policy provides IP application developers, infrastructure vendors and service providers with the opportunity to bring to market new IP enhanced conferencing and innovative services within the universal framework of SIP and MSCML. Specific information regarding this offer may be obtained from the IETF. "It is in our DNA DNA: see nucleic acid. DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid One of two types of nucleic acid (the other is RNA); a complex organic compound found in all living cells and many viruses. It is the chemical substance of genes. at SnowShore to develop inclusive and standardized solutions," said Eric Burger, SnowShore CTO (Chief Technical Officer) The executive responsible for the technical direction of an organization. See CIO and salary survey. and an author of MSCML. "Unlike other proprietary protocols which resemble closely guarded treasure maps -- only available to certain vendors and on a royalty basis -- MSCML is a public roadmap that leads developers, vendors and service providers down the road to successful development and deployment of innovative, feature rich enhanced IP services." Burger is a key contributor to the development and broad acceptance of other open standards Specifications for hardware and software that are developed by a standards organization or a consortium involved in supporting a standard. Available to the public for developing compliant products, open standards imply "open systems;" that an existing component in a system can be replaced such as SIP and VXML See VoiceXML. . He has written numerous documents and standards for the IETF, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium, www.w3.org) An international industry consortium founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee to develop standards for the Web. It is hosted in the U.S. by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT (www.csail.mit.edu/index.php). , CableLabs, and the IPCC See IMS Forum. . Industry Adopted and Deployed MSCML is a SIP-based development and control language for IP enhanced conferencing services. MSCML is used in conjunction with SIP to provide advanced conferencing and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) An automated telephone information system that speaks to the caller with a combination of fixed voice menus and data extracted from databases in real time. functions. Over the course of its development and testing in the last two years, MSCML has become the control protocol of choice within the industry for innovative IP enhanced conferencing applications and features. MSCML is currently being used by a number of application developers, media server manufacturers, equipment vendors and service providers in trials and live deployments including Z-Tel, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) , Broadsoft, Bay Packets, Commetrex, Leapstone and Ubiquity Software. Industry watchers and vendors alike view MSCML as the essential protocol for call control between the media server and application server in the IP services architecture. "MSCML represents the next step in the development and delivery of SIP conferencing services enabling the incorporation of advanced features and controls such as sizing and resizing, in-conference IVR operations and conference event reporting," said Marc Beattie, Senior Partner Wainhouse Research. "MSCML provides both a standardized framework and functionality to guide developers in introducing a wide range of innovative IP services that have not been available to this point." MSCML is understood to be the only language being deployed for SIP enhanced conferencing and serves as the framework and development language for a broad array of innovative IP services such as messaging and IP Centrex. In conferencing, MSCML enables the development of advanced IP conference functions such as floor control, sidebar-conferencing, gain control and other service innovations. "We believe by offering MSCML to the industry, it will spur true innovation and growth of new IP services that will benefit the entire VoIP market," concluded Burger. "MSCML is a tried and true solution that provides vendors and service providers alike with the fuel necessary for powering a new generation of multimedia applications." About MSCML Prior to MSCML, there was no standard way to deliver SIP-based enhanced conferencing. Basic SIP constructs, such as described in the IETF's Basic Network Media Services with SIP(4), served simple n-way conferencing well. The SIP URI Uri, in the Bible Uri (y  `rī), in the Bible.1 Father of Bezaleel (1.) 2 Father of Geber (2.) 3 Porter. provides a natural mechanism for identifying a specific SIP conference, while INVITE and BYE methods elegantly implement conference join and leave semantics. However, enhanced conferencing applications also require features such as sizing and resizing, in-conference IVR operations (e.g. recording and playing participant names to the full conference) and conference event reporting. MSCML payloads within standard SIP INVITE and INFO requests realize these features. For more information about MSCML and the vendors currently deploying the protocol, access the SnowShore web site at www.snowshore.com and download a copy of its white paper. About SnowShore Networks SnowShore Networks (www.SnowShore.com), a telecommunications equipment company, provides innovative, carrier-grade IP communications infrastructure products to its OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) The rebranding of equipment and selling it. The term initially referred to the company that made the products (the "original" manufacturer), but eventually became widely used to refer to the organization that buys the products and and System Integrator customers enabling them to deliver a wide array of IP solutions to their service provider customers. SnowShore's suite of media processing products, which include the N20 and A1-Media Server and the A1-Media Firewall, feature SnowShore's patent pending WireSpeedMedia technology, a high performance multimedia processing engine that is blended with an open and flexible platform architecture to enable SnowShore's customers to deliver customized communication solutions with assured performance at scale. Founded in May 2000, SnowShore Networks is privately held and backed by Charles River Ventures, Matrix Partners, St. Paul Ventures, and 3i. SnowShore Networks: Powering the Service-Ready Network(TM). |
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