Selsius Systems was a telecommunications company in Dallas, Texas that developed and marketed some of the first IP telephony gear. It was co-founded by Richard Platt and David Tucker. Selsius was incorporated in 1997 and acquired by Cisco Systems in November, 1998.[1]
Selsius Systems, Inc. was organized in July, 1997 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Intecom,[2] a Dallas-based PBX (Private Branch Exchange) manufacturer, with David C. Tucker as CEO, Richard B. Platt as VP of Engineering and Kevin Brown as VP of Sales and Marketing, as well as numerous other important positions held by the employees of Selsius Systems including John Alexander, Paul Hahn, Dave Corley, Jeff Sanders, and Scott Veibell.
The first commercially available IP phone was the Selsius 30SP.[citation needed] In November, 1997, the company sold five 30SP phones to the TRI lab of Southwestern Bell in San Antonio.
Selsius Systems was borne out of Incite, a division of Intecom, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Lagardere SCA, a French conglomerate. The Incite team, led by Platt and Tucker, developed and marketed a video PBX. The Incite concept was outlined on a napkin in 1993 and formally organized as a division within Intecom in mid-1994.[citation needed] While Incite's distributed call control software architecture was innovative, the market for a high-end video PBX was not responsive. At Tucker's urging, executives from Intecom and their parent company Matra Communications kept the Incite team together as Selsius was spun out into its own company. Approximately 35 engineers, marketing and sales personnel were part of the original Selsius organization. At the time of the Cisco acquisition, the Selsius team had about 55 employees. From the core call control component of Incite, the Incite Multimedia Manager, grew the Selsius-CallManager, Cisco CallManager, and ultimately Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM).[citation needed]
Following the acquisition, Platt and Tucker were retained as Cisco executives in the IP Telephony division, directly overseeing the product they helped to create. Nearly all of the original Selsius employees joined the Cisco development organization, except for a few Selsius employees who chose the buy-out rather than continuing on with the product at Cisco. Some original Selsius employees have left Cisco, including Platt and Kevin Brown who, as of 2006, was the CEO of IPcelerate. The CallManager product was still in need of significant work when acquired, often referred to internally within Cisco as "CallManagler" because of its immature feature set.[3]
Selsius Legacy
The current invocation of the Selsius legacy is Cisco Unified Communications Manager[4] and the IP phones which still use (among other protocols) the original protocol created by Selsius engineers to facilitate voice over IP, the Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP). Analog gateways, which used the Skinny Gateway Control Protocol (SGCP), have since been end-of-lifed by Cisco. Cisco Unified Communications Manager is the call processing component of the Cisco Unified Communications System. As of 2005, Cisco Unified Communications Manager and related communications products are responsible for approximately $1 billion in revenue for Cisco. Pull-through revenue, i.e. revenue generated on other equipment such as switches and routers as a consequence of selling Cisco Unified Communications Manager to Cisco (from enterprise switches, routers and other network infrastructure components) has been estimated by some[citation needed] to be as high as three times the Cisco Unified Communications Manager-related revenue. In its first year of operation, Selsius sold about 3,000 IP phones. In 2006, Cisco sold 3,000 of its IP phones - an extension of the Selsius legacy - every eight hours.[citation needed]
Learn More About Selsius
Richard Platt wrote the foreword to the first Cisco Press book published on the Unified Communications technology (CallManager, as it was known at that time), titled Cisco CallManager Fundamentals. The book was authored by original Selsius (now Cisco) employees John Alexander, Chris Pearce, Anne Smith, and Delon Whetten. In the foreword, Richard gives an insider's look at the genesis of the Selsius technological advancement: "This was the first time that a telephone call had been made entirely with Internet technology consisting of a true IP phone (connected over Ethernet), over an IP network, managed by an IP-controlled server appropriately named the CallManager." As Richard goes on to say, "This book represents the first book, written by the designers, of the first IP telephony solution ever!" The book's ISBN is 1-58705-008-0 and is now in its second edition.
A Cisco employee, Mark Nelson, has a blog post devoted to Selsius, including photos of the key players Platt, Tucker, Alexander, Sanders, and Hahn. Nelson worked with Richard Platt and other Selsius engineering teams at Cisco immediately after Selsius was acquired by Cisco.[5]
Nortel Networks attempted to acquire Selsius shortly before Cisco successfully acquired Selsius and its employees and technology. The Nortel bid was withdrawn, lacking Selsius employee support for the deal.[citation needed]
3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe explained the name 3Com was a contraction of "Computer Communication Compatibility", with its focus on Ethernet technology that he had co-invented, which enabled the networking of computers.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet telephony, broadband telephony, and broadband phone service specifically refer to the provisioning of communications services over the Internet, rather than via the public switched telephone network (PSTN), also known as plain old telephone service (POTS).
The Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP) is a proprietary network terminal control protocol originally developed by Selsius Systems, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1998.
HCL Sametime Premium is a client–server application and middleware platform that provides real-time, unified communications and collaboration for enterprises. Those capabilities include presence information, enterprise instant messaging, web conferencing, community collaboration, and telephony capabilities and integration. Currently it is developed and sold by HCL Software, a division of Indian company HCL Technologies, until 2019 by the Lotus Software division of IBM.
Aastra Technologies Limited, formerly headquartered in Concord, Ontario, Canada, made products and systems for accessing communication networks, including the Internet. Its products included residential and business telephone terminals, screen telephones, Enterprise private branch exchanges (PBX), network access terminals and high-quality digital video encoders, decoders and gateways. Residential telephone equipment was sold in the United States as Bell equipment by Sonecor brand, which represented Southern New England Telecommunications.
Asterisk is a software implementation of a private branch exchange (PBX). In conjunction with suitable telephony hardware interfaces and network applications, Asterisk is used to establish and control telephone calls between telecommunication endpoints, such as customary telephone sets, destinations on the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and devices or services on voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks. Its name comes from the asterisk (*) symbol for a signal used in dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) dialing.
A business telephone system is a multiline telephone system typically used in business environments, encompassing systems ranging in technology from the key telephone system (KTS) to the private branch exchange (PBX).
An Internet telephony service provider (ITSP) offers digital telecommunications services based on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) that are provisioned via the Internet.
Skype for Business Server is real-time communications server software that provides the infrastructure for enterprise instant messaging, presence, VoIP, ad hoc and structured conferences and PSTN connectivity through a third-party gateway or SIP trunk. These features are available within an organization, between organizations and with external users on the public internet or standard phones.
sipXecs is a free software enterprise communications system.
Nortel Meridian is a private branch exchange telephone switching system. It provides advanced voice features, data connectivity, LAN communications, computer telephony integration (CTI), and information services for communication applications ranging from 60 to 80,000 lines.
Unified communications (UC) is a business and marketing concept describing the integration of enterprise communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, voice, mobility features, audio, web & video conferencing, fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), desktop sharing, data sharing, call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging. UC is not necessarily a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types.
UNIStim is a deprecated Telecommunications protocol developed by Nortel for IP Phone and IP PBX communications.
Avaya IP Phone 1140E in telecommunications is a desktop Internet Protocol client from 1100-series manufactured by Avaya for unified communications. The phone can operate on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) or UNIStim protocols. The SIP firmware supports presence selection and notification along with secure instant messaging. This device has an integrated 10/100/1000BASE-T auto-sensing Ethernet switch with two ports and an integrated USB port, and is Bluetooth capable. The SIP version of this phone has full IPv6 functionality and only requires 2.9 watts of power.
TouchWave, Inc., was a privately held Palo Alto, California IP-telephony network switch provider founded in 1997. TouchWave developed a product line called WebSwitch that was designed to replace traditional private telephone exchange systems in small-to-medium-sized companies. WebSwitch was part of a phone system that incorporates communication features provided by the Internet. The rapid success of TouchWave was memorialized with awards and an acquisition by Ericsson Communications for $46M two years after TouchWave was founded. Ericsson continued the TouchWave product line under the name WebCom, but its efforts have been viewed as less than successful.
The Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA) was a telecommunications alliance between Microsoft and Nortel, created in July 2006, to co-develop, integrate, market, sell, and support unified communications products. The goal of the alliance is to make integrated hardware and software solutions that join together voice, video, and data communications without requiring gateways or middleware. Microsoft and Nortel share developing technologies and patents for unified communications products.
Cloud communications are Internet-based voice and data communications where telecommunications applications, switching and storage are hosted by a third-party outside of the organization using them, and they are accessed over the public Internet. Cloud services is a broad term, referring primarily to data-center-hosted services that are run and accessed over an Internet infrastructure. Until recently, these services have been data-centric, but with the evolution of VoIP, voice has become part of the cloud phenomenon. Cloud telephony refers specifically to voice services and more specifically the replacement of conventional business telephone equipment, such as a private branch exchange (PBX), with third-party VoIP service.
SIP trunking is a voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology and streaming media service based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) by which Internet telephony service providers (ITSPs) deliver telephone services and unified communications to customers equipped with SIP-based private branch exchange (IP-PBX) and unified communications facilities. Most unified communications applications provide voice, video, and other streaming media applications such as desktop sharing, web conferencing, and shared whiteboard.
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