A leader in fixed-mobile connectivity (FMC) solutions, NextPoint™, announced today the availability of its Unified Communications Exchange™ (UCX) solution. The UCX, powered by the NextPoint carrier-grade IntelliConnect® system, is based on the NextPoint Multi-Protocol Session Exchange (MSX), an IP-based session routing engine that directs real-time sessions over network interconnects. The UCX is designed to solve the most pressing unified communications challenges that large, global enterprises face today.

Mark Pugerude, CMO of NextPoint Networks said: “After years of working with more than 550 service providers and large enterprise customers, and their suppliers and systems integrators, we have gained invaluable insight into the obstacles and opportunities companies face in their pursuit of unified communications to maximize employee productivity”. “Until now, enterprises have had no access to a single comprehensive product that fully meets the functional, performance and security requirements of a distributed enterprise environment. NextPoint’s UCX solution fills that void.”

The unified communications market, according to a recent Infonetics Research report, is expected to grow in the high double digits annually at least through 2010, spearheaded by unified messaging. Enterprises, to capture the benefits of unified communications, must address a number of significant concerns. NextPoint’s UCX was designed to help enterprises overcome these challenges, including:

    * Interoperability - Enterprises do not have the luxury of calling upon a single vendor to meet all their needs, to truly achieve unified communications in today’s market, leading to heterogeneous communications environments. At the heart of the UCX is the ability to provide end-to-end integration between different vendors' products, delivering unified services across IP-PBXs and IP-Centrex; audio, video and web conferencing; voice mail, fax mail and unified messaging systems; and Instant Messaging platforms. With the ability to support Presence, the UCX can integrate traditionally disparate systems to provide the foundation for seamless collaboration.
    * Scalability - Current enterprise communications systems typically allow for up to 2,000-3,000 simultaneous calls before reaching capacity and impacting operations. NextPoint’s UCX can scale to 40,000 simultaneous calls, without complicated augmentations or upgrades.
    * Migration – Many enterprises are operating with both legacy H.323 and next-generation SIP systems. NextPoint’s UCX is the only solution available that supports both protocols, so companies can execute a graceful transition to SIP without requiring an immediate, wholesale infrastructure replacement.
    * Instant messaging – The UCX’s instant messaging feature supports SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions), which enables instant messaging to move beyond traditional text-based services to incorporate the integration of voice and video communications.
    * Routing - The UCX reduces the effort necessary to implement routing updates into each device throughout the enterprise by centralizing routing control in a single location.
    * Availability – NextPoint’s UCX is highly available, and system failover is undetectable.
    * Intelligence and insight – When coupled with NextPoint’s award-winning Quality of Service (QoS) and dynamic policy management system – the Real-Time Session Manager (RSM) – the UCX provides enterprises with real-time intelligence and insight for all communications traffic running on an IP-based network.

Catharine Trebnick, principal at America's Growth Capital said: “The Unified Communications Exchange demonstrates NextPoint’s forward-thinking capabilities – with the support of voice, video and IM – while also showing the company’s dedication to its security-based roots”. “There is an obvious demand in the market that was not being fully addressed prior to the launch of this groundbreaking solution. NextPoint’s proactive response to this demand is certain to raise awareness in the enterprise community and strengthen the company’s position as an industry leader.”

Other business-critical functionality are included by NextPoint’s UCX, such as transport layer security (TLS), traffic management and stateful SIP dialog processing, Tel-URI support for SIP-based public and private numbering, and Network Address Translation (NAT) enhancements.