Patton's SmartNode Products Certified Interoperable with Lotus Sametime

Patton is a multi-national organization that designs, develops, and manufactures electronic communications equipment for network access, connectivity, VoIP, triple-play and video surveillance that is making consistently big waves in the Unified Communications (UC) space. At ITExpo in February, they announced, in alliance with the Elastix project – an open source UC distribution project – that they had released a mutually certified UC solution.

Now, Patton (USA) and Patton-Inalp (Switzerland) have announced that IBM has tested and certified the company’s SmartNode VoIP gateways, VoIP routers and IADs for interoperability with the Lotus Sametime unified communications (UC) platform.Why is this important? With SmartNode VoIP routers, Patton says large enterprises can control capital expenses while implementing UC by integrating existing public branch exchange  phone systems and PSTN connections into IBM’s Lotus Sametime platform.

Sametime was designed to remove the seams between email, voicemail, instant messaging, wired and wireless phones while providing presence status, Company officials said that this enables workers to avoid such time wasters as looking up contact information and calling people who aren’t available. Moreover, SmartNode gateways offer immediate access to the world of UC for organizations using traditional analog or digital phone systems. Working together, the companies could feasibly create an even better connected world.

Their specs boast impressive any-service-any-port (ASAP) capabilities that can deliver any WAN service on every industry-standard telephony interface that is currently in use. Built to be highly scalable (SMBs all the way to enterprise-sized organizations), SmartNode scales from 2 to 120 concurrent VoIP or fax calls, and supports SIP, H.323, ISDN, and POTS telephony plus T.38 and SuperG3 FAX over TDM/PSTN and IP/Ethernet services simultaneously.

Company officials said that most IBM-certified VoIP equipment is less scalable in terms of interface types, port counts, and number of concurrent calls. SmartNode enriches IBM’s Sametime solution with advanced telephony features. Therefore, it upgrades a legacy solution in all the right ways.

These features include integration of PSTN trunks and legacy PBX systems into Sametime/Telephony Control Server (TCS); VoIP and data survivability via PSTN access/breakout/fallback and IP link redundancy; PBX backup against IP trunk failure to the IBM TCS; secure VPNs with IPsec-encrypted voice.

Additional features include any-to-any least-cost call routing and dial-map planning; routed Internet Access with QoS for toll quality voice; traffic management with voice prioritization; and more.