Telica has entered into an OEM agreement with Alcatel, allowing Alcatel to sell, service, and support Telica's Plexus 9000 product for Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) deployments.

The five-year contract gives Alcatel a non-exclusive agreement to incorporate and integrate the Telica product within its Next Generation Networks (NGN) solutions portfolio sold in the U.S. market.

The NGN product suite, including softswitches and media gateways, is based on open standards to meet the needs of interexchange carriers, incumbent local exchange carriers, competitive local exchange carriers, and wireless networks. Alcatel has adopted open standards to ensure interworking with different vendors' products. For softswitches and media gateways, supported standards include MGCP,
H.323, H.248/Megaco, SIP/SIP-T, BICC, and SS7.

Alcatel and Telica have worked together on testing the product and interoperability of Alcatel's next generation softswitch platforms and Telica's Plexus 9000 as a VoIP media gateway.

Alcatel (Paris) designs, develops, and builds communications networks that enable carriers, service providers, and enterprises to deliver any type of content, such as voice, data, and multimedia, to any type of consumer. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.alcatel.com

Telica (Marlboro, MA) provides softswitch-based voice and data infrastructure products for today's evolving telecommunications networks. For more information, visit www.telica.com.