Natural MicroSystems Corporation

PRODUCTS AND SERVICES (continued)

Fusion. In addition, we market Fusion, a branded package incorporating several of our products. It is a scalable, high performance development platform for standards-based IP telephony solutions. Fusion provides a software development environment designed specifically for the creation of IP telephony gateway solutions. Fusion’s modular architecture allows support for existing protocols such as the International Telecommunication Union’s H.323 specification and a growing list of emerging protocols like Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP) and Session Initiation Protocol. Fusion enables developers to create application solutions with configurations from four analog ports to multiple T1s/E1s with no increase in latency or decrease in performance.

Services and Customer Support. To complement our hardware and software products, we also offer consulting and support services. Our NaturalEdge Engineering Consulting Services include:

• Systems architecture and engineering services that assist customers with all facets of product development, from concept definition to feasibility analysis to functional specifications;
  
  
• Design consulting services that create working prototypes and provide a range of engineering services, including specifications and detailed project plans; and
  
  
• Development and integration services that help customers develop value-added product features, extend product functionality, or migrate to newer technology while protecting investments in existing offerings.
  
  
• In addition, as part of our NaturalEdge Global Support, we offer a variety of support programs ranging from NaturalEdge Web Support to Global On-Call Support, which provides support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

TECHNOLOGY
We offer high performance software and hardware component technologies for converged network solutions such as communications gateways and enhanced service platforms for IP, ATM, wireless and wireline communications networks. Our technology components include a flexible software architecture that allows our technology to be readily adopted by major communications equipment suppliers. Our technology is engineered to provide telecommunications quality and availability while leveraging the broad capabilities of mass-market computer platforms. Our software technology is available on board-level products for open computing platforms or as hardware reference designs for embedded applications and systems. To facilitate the development of specific solutions, we provide sample applications and demonstration programs. Our architecture includes software and hardware reference designs, as well as hardware and firmware implementations of these core technologies:

• Digital signal processing software and related compute engines. We base our solutions on high performance commercial digital signal processors integrated with proprietary technology to provide high density, scalable signal processing arrays.
  
  
• Media stream protocol processing. Our high performance packet processing digital signal processor firmware technology allows for the efficient support of media streams on IP and other packet networks and enhanced services platforms for packet networks.
  
  
• Global network interfaces and protocol technology. We offer many of the commonly used digital and analog telephony interfaces as well as Ethernet and T1/E1 WAN data interfaces. Our PSTN protocol technologies include all major channel-associated signaling variants and ISDN and SS7 signaling, as well as leading Voice-over-IP call control protocols such as H.323 and MGCP. Our interface and protocol technology allows us to rapidly obtain interoperability and approvals for new products in all major markets, and to efficiently respond to our customers’ requirements for public network connections and approvals in other markets.
  
  
• Telecommunications switching technology. Our Natural Call Control call management software and our efficient hardware implementation of industry standard CTBus interfaces combine to provide an extremely flexible, scalable and cost-effective platform for telecommunications switching.
  
  
• Packet classification and queuing for differentiated IP servicing provisioning. Our packet classification and queuing technology supports differentiated quality of IP services using ATM and other wide area network protocols. The proprietary digital signal processor-based technology provides wire speed performance levels with the flexibility of a software-only approach.
  
  
• Flexible, high performance communications software and systems architecture. Our high performance software architecture minimizes the computational load on the host processors, freeing system resources for the use of our customers’ applications while providing the highest possible capacity on any specific computing platform. The flexibility of our programming interface supports diverse customer software models and simplifies our customers’ development efforts.
  
  
• Carrier class high availability technology. We deliver hot-swap enabled CompactPCI products and have established an industry leading software infrastructure to support carrier class deployments. We offer systems level software that extends system availability during component failures, system maintenance and upgrades.