Microsoft (News - Alert) is lining up an impressive roster of companies to license its new voice codec software, the company said today at the VoiceCon San Francisco 2007 Conference.

Intel Corporation., Texas Instruments Inc., AudioCodes Ltd., Dialogic Corp., LG-Nortel Co. Ltd. (News - Alert) and Polycom Inc. all have signed on the dotted line and are expected to immediately begin delivering Microsoft’s RT Audio Codec.

The software, used to compress digital speech samples into a digital media bitstream, will provides these partners with the flexibility to build customized solutions for customers, according to Microsoft.

“As we approach the general availability of our unified communications products, we’re seeing tremendous validation for our offerings from industry players and early adopters alike,” said Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president in the Unified Communications (News - Alert) Group at Microsoft.

For example, by converting analog sound into secure digital packets for transmission and then restoring the data into audible sound, RT Audio Codec can be used in an array of solutions, such as audio conferencing, video, wireless over Internet Protocol and games.

Pall pointed out that customers have already downloaded 80,000 copies of the beta for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 in just five months, marking a “new era of business communication” defined by software, not hardware — and expects sound quality to be one of the key product differentiators.

And this “new era” is getting off to a fast start. Intel (News - Alert) says it will deliver the codec in an upcoming Intel Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) software library release optimized for the PC platform to further accelerate industry adoption and reduce implementation barriers.

Doug Davis, vice president of the Digital Enterprise Group at Intel, said the companies are working closely to deliver unified communications with Microsoft’s software being powered by Intel’s multi-core client, server platforms and media infrastructure technologies.

AudioCodes (News - Alert), a producer of voice over IP, voice over DSL, and voice over ATM packet processors, said they will team with the software giant to deliver a unified communications solution that natively operates with existing PBX systems and can directly connect to the PSTN.

”This collaboration enables our customers to protect and leverage on existing telephony investments while providing a basis for advancing to the next level of voice communications,” Lior Aldema, vice president of Marketing at AudioCodes, said.

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Tim Gray is a Web Editor for TMCnet, covering news in the IP communications, call center and customer relationship management industries. To see more of his articles, please visit Tim Gray’s columnist page.

Internet Protocol (IP)	X
IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data in packets over the Internet. I...more

Private Branch Exchange (PBX)	X
Originally, telephone features were provided by telephone central office switching systems, often called CENTREX. PBX systems emerged as customers wanted to have more calling features and control over...more

Codec	X
Compression-DECompression used in video and VoIP to increase the number of telephone conversation over the same bandwidth. There are two types of compression algorithms (rule-of-thumb). Lossless use...more