Two NXTcomm newcomers are planning to capitalize on the growing demand for more advanced IP services, although in very different ways.

Phybridge is bringing a practical solution for delivering IP services and power over Ethernet services over the Cat3 telephone wiring that businesses are using already. McObject is bringing embedded databases to facilitate IP services by putting the database into the application, where it can run faster and without requiring a hard drive.

Phybridge is a Canadian company founded by Oliver Emmanuel, the man who also invented the UniPhyer, a gateway that connects an IP network to legacy telephone cabling and turns any IP-PBX into a plug-and-play solution. The UniPhyer is technology-agnostic, working with any IP phone or PBX, the company said.

“This is an all-IP solution that runs Ethernet and power over Ethernet over the existing telephone cabling,” said Will Harris, vice president of sales, for Phybridge. “When the customer wants to go to IP telephony and a unified communications solution, this represents a very easy way for the mid-market to get benefits of IP telephony.”

Previously, companies had to recable to deliver voice over IP (VoIP) or other IP services, and that represented both a cost and an inconvenience to business customers, Harris said.

Since launching the product in March, Phybridge has been getting strong industry response. The company plans to sell through partners, especially service providers, Harris said, as they seek to aid business customers’ move to all-IP in a way that is cost-effective.

McObject, an embedded database vendor, also is coming to NXTcomm for the first time, exhibiting technology that is enabling new IP services.

“Everybody knows about Oracle — we provide the same sort of data management services that Oracle does but at the other end of computing spectrum,” said Steve Graves, CEO of McObject. “What we generally call embedded database systems are databases that mostly run in memory and don’t have to reside on a hard disk. Instead of being part of a client-server architecture, this is a library that gets linked into the application and is accessed by the application, which can give it blazingly fast speed. Also, it can run in routers that don’t have any hard disks.”

McObject technology facilitates IP services such as VoIP and WiMAX, and it also is the database inside F5 Networks, an application delivery networking specialist. McObject has announced customers in addition to F5, including NextPoint and Soma Networks.

“Our customers all have a lot of data they need to manage and need to manage it very quickly,” Graves said. “They all provide different types of IP services that require a whole bunch of data to manage, and it has to be managed very quickly. In some cases, these infrastructure devices have relatively low resources compared to modern desktops. For example, a WiMAX base station has modest CPU, limited memory and no hard disk. There are also scalability advantages to an embedded database in that you can manage a larger amount of data in a smaller [footprint].”