Both products support H.323, the ITU conferencing standard on which many telco equipment providers have already standardized. Meanwhile, Intel says the data vendors have to realize that convergence is more than just throwing voice and data on the same line. There has to be the same level of quality and features that users get with today's voice calls. To guarantee quality, researchers are hard at work on traffic management. Intel is working with software vendors to develop policy-based management tools.
Policies are rules that dictate priority, quality of service and access for network traffic.
With protocol drafts in the IETF and Desktop Management Task Force, Intel is chairing both standards efforts. Intel hopes to license its policy technology to all the big data players, including Cisco and Ascend. Intel Architecture Labs already has worked with Hewlett-Packard to add support for policies in HP OpenView 2.0 and other HP products. Systems Management, Storage, LANs and The Edge. Click here to sign up.