I recently had a chance to talk with Dowling Bowman, Product Manager at ADTRAN. We did an online live meeting so that Dowling could run through a slide deck as we spoke. Being nimble of fingers, I captured a few of the slides that I'll insert here. I was impressed enough with this solution that I'm sharing some details.

Note: I'm intentionally sharing the screenshots in a larger size that fits well here for visibility. You can click on any of the screenshots to get to the original capture.

ADTRAN's introducing a new product to the VoIP market, the NetVanta 1355, and we really dug into the product features and where this box fits in the market.

ADTRAN's a company that catches my eye, in part because they've been around for 20 years. They've been quite successful at reinventing themselves to serve the market. They're now over 1,00 employees with revenues of $473 million last year, so they've got some substance.

We all see VoIP on the rise as the ease of implementing IP solutions increases and the push toward next-generation network features keep tickling the edges of our technologues. One of the great promises of ATM, a technology that never penetrated the enterprise in the way proponents predicted, was the idea of bandwidth on demand. I don't believe IP has come close to some of the wild fantasies early ATM advocates predicted, but IP does give us a solid, reliablem best efforts network, with bandwidth available as needed, if not on demand.

Like every vendor in the space, ADTRAN sees financial projections that are quite optimistic. In particular, they're very interested in the SMB market. The NetVanta plays nicely to large enterprise branch office solutions. Dowling indicated to me they're seeing a lot of uptake in that niche. But they're really focused on a solution for the SMB space that fits across the whole spectrum of vertical markets.




They took a close look at some of the issues hosted services have to address in the SMB space and came up with some basic, core issues:

• Multi-product or multi-vendor solutions are a problem
• Complexity needs to be reduced
• The total CPE costs are too high
• IP phone provisioning and management needs to be simplified
• Customers need survivability in the event of outages
• Local and emergency call handling is important, and often overlooked
• Voice quality and QoS mechanisms are needed
• The solution has to be managable

Here's what they did with the NetVanta 1355



This is a real integrated services solution

• Router
• DSU/CSU
• Firewall
• VPN
• SIP Gateway
• PoE Ethernet Switch
• Phone support

ADTRAN's approach was to bring affordable VoIP to businesses with single or multiple locations; simplify both the installation and maintenance; leverage the existing carrier VoIP infrastructure for next-generation featuresl provide for emergency service, and provide power over Ethernet in the process.

Here are links to photos of the NetVanta 1355 (1, 2). I'm inserting the slides because they give more details.

Front View



I'll let the slide above speak for itself and only make two point. The list price seems pretty reasonable to me for everything this box includes. The other point is while this is an introduction, the NetVanta 1355 is available now and shipping now. Dowling assures me this isn't a future. It's ready for installation now.

Rear View



Note the optional grwoth capacity for T1, FXS, FXO connections if needed.

It's got DHCP and TFP built in for configuring phones. Both the NetVanta 1355 and the phones can easily be administered remotely. Configuration can be done via command line or web interface. It can support 150 SIP phones and handle 84 concurrent phone calls.

I've got more information, but if this looks like a fit for your needs, I'd suggest you go to the product page on ADTRAN's web site and check it out for yourself.

ADTRAN has proven to be a survivable company over the past twenty years. They've done so be continually reinventing to serve the market and by offering some pretty solid products. This is one that I expect will be a big hit in the market.

Technorati Tags: ADTRAN, NetVanta 1355, unified communications, VoIP