nnel. The show will also feature more mature versions of platform-independent, low-cost network computers (NCs).
Telecommunications Explosion
In anticipation of a more liberalized European telecommunications market in 1998, producers and distributors are expecting a boom in equipment sales. Telecommunications exhibits will occupy six halls (14, 15, 16, 17, 26 and 27) dedicated to the linkage of regional and city networks, as well as to corporate WANs over ISDN, ATM, cable TV, digital subscriber lines, cellular radio, and satellite systems.
RAD Data Communications (Tel Aviv, Israel), for example, will display its new E1 access system for city networks as well as its LRS-12 modem hub, which enables the combination of high-bit-rate digital subscriber line (HDSL) and fiber-optic modems. The company's new FOMi-E1/T1 line of fiber-optic modems features sophisticated in-band management and support for SNMP.
Taiwanese modem manufacturer E-Tec
h will announce a line of 56-Kbps modems, as well as the CyberBullet cable-TV modem, which is based on the company's own bandwidth-sharing method.
The enormous popularity of ISDN in Europe is the propelling force behind many new products. At the workstation level, companies such as AVM, Elsa, and Eicon.Diehl are developing more robust communications solutions for Windows 95 and NT 4.0. "The market is demanding mature ISDN drivers for workstations running NT; that's part of our focus for this year's CeBIT," says Uwe Scholz, corporate communications manager with AVM (Berlin, Germany). The company's NTi Tuning Kit for ISDN has a collection of 32-bit NT drivers for passive ISDN boards supporting Common API (CAPI) 2.0 as well as Microsoft's NDIS/WAN Miniport API.
Elsa (Aachen, Germany) extends its family of ISDN boards with the high-end Quickstep 3000, which includes ISDN as well as an analog modem chip on-board.
Similarly, Eicon.Diehl's (Leonberg, Germany) new range of Diva 2.0 ISDN boards now include
s the Diva Pro 2.0 program, which also supports analog communications. Diva Pro 2.0 will be available in both PCI and PC Card versions.
With its SwissMod family of ISDN terminal adapters, Telelink (Cham, Switzerland) goes one step further. The latest versions of this product line are now based on what the company refers to as a
superhybrid architecture
: They feature ISDN as well as a modem socket in the same case. By linking the SwissMod to the ISDN socket, you can transfer files or remotely access a LAN or the Internet over ISDN. With another cord that you plug into the SwissMod analog socket, you can run the same application over the telephone network.
Telelink's Cardline Twin PC Card also has ISDN and telephone sockets on-board. But the latest version of the card has an on-board interface for the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network. Thus, no matter what type of network is available, the new Cardline Twin cards ensure that your mobile computer can be hooked to your corpora
te network.
An interesting development comes from the German telecommunications equipment manufacturer Elmeg (Peine). The company will introduce a new range of its TAPI-enabled
ISDN switches
. These switches enable you to use standard analog phone and fax equipment with ISDN devices. A small office user, for example, can program his or her PC to direct calls from a certain postal-code area to one of the switches' eight extensions.
For larger call centers, Siemens Nixdorf (Munich, Germany) has developed a comprehensive and easy-to-use telephony interface. SimplyPhone supports call forwarding and conference calls via drag and drop and integrates with all MAPI and TAPI applications, as well as with X.500 directory services.
Other show highlights from Siemens include a groupware-enabled PC desktop administration tool, called Desk 97, that lets users adjust standard office applications to their needs. Desk 97, the company's Enterprise Middleware Framework (EMF), and other Siemens a
pplications now all integrate with Community, the company's software-component and client/server architecture for Windows.
USB Peripherals
The USB architecture promises to make it easier to connect peripherals to PCs. CeBIT will offer many USB-enabled keyboards, including one from Cherry (Auerbach, Germany); monitors; loudspeakers; and sound boards. Also featured will be a group of new PCs that support USB, including Siemens-Nixdorf's new Scenic PT 5xx systems.
One of USB's limits is that it cannot handle uncompressed live video, such as what's needed for MPEG-2 and DVD data streams. The IEEE-1394 FireWire bus standard was devised to handle requirements for higher throughput.
New FireWire video-editing solutions now come from companies such as
Fast Multimedia
(Munich, Germany) and miro (Braunschweig, Germany). Fast's DV Master and the miroVideo DV100 both deploy a codec chip for Sony's Digital Video format that, together with the high data transfer rates
of the FireWire bus (up to 200 Mbps), enables high-quality real-time video editing.
The miroVideo DV100 ships with the company's StoryTools nonlinear editing software, which allows for the development of storyboards via drag and drop. For Fast Multimedia's video-editing boards, Russian software publisher AIST has developed a new version of its MediaMania Broadcast animation and compositing program. MediaMania BroadcastVM 2.0 supports morphing, ghosting, and professional color keying. Ulead Systems (Taipei, Taiwan) will showcase at CeBIT a new version of its popular MediaStudio Pro video-editing software package. Version 3.0 makes more effective use of system resources, resulting in higher rendering speeds.
Support for Microsoft's ActiveMovie and Direct3D APIs is an important feature of Scala's (Oslo, Norway) new MM200 multimedia authoring software. One of the most significant enhancements of the MM200 over the previous version, the MM100, is real-time antialiasing of fonts, according to Gilles Bourdin
of Scala's German subsidiary.
At last year's show, a large number of Java development tools made their debut. This year, Java security solutions that defend corporate networks against hostile applets are becoming extremely important. Start-up company Finjan Software (Netanya, Israel), for example, has developed SurfinGate, a program that shields a single desktop or a network against applets that could violate security requirements or the integrity of the Java virtual-machine environment.
New CASE Tools
CeBIT 97 will be the first big show to offer a multitude of CASE tools that support UML, a unification of the Booch, Objectory, and OMT methods that's widely seen as the standard poised to supersede the many object-oriented design-and-analysis methods currently on the market.
Examples of UML-compliant tools at CeBIT include version 5.0 of MID's (Nuremberg, Germany) Innovator Object Workbench (IOW) and Innovative Software's (Frankfurt, Germany) Object Engineering Workbench (OEW)
for C++ and Java 3.0. IOW is an integrated CASE development environment that includes a complete software life-cycle scheme and supports team development over WANs. In addition to UML support, version 5.0 of the program offers a class-hierarchy browser, version management, and an internal mail function.
By supporting UML and a new repository architecture for team development, the OEW 3.0 visual programming environment now classifies as a fully fledged CASE tool. It comes in two versions, one for C++ and one for Java. The Java version also includes a decompiler that can reverse-engineer compiled Java byte code into source code.
Another innovation making its show debut at CeBIT that many Web-site programmers will enjoy is the heitml programming language, developed by H.E.I. (Mannheim, Germany), a spin-off company of the University of Karlsruhe. Version 1.0 of the language is a combined document-description, template-generation, and scripting language for Web publishing. It has a syntax similar to that
of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that was specially created for database applications. It was designed as an extension of HTML and, because it closely integrates with SQL and doesn't depend on other scripting languages, it facilitates direct access of a database from a Web application.
CeBIT attendees will also witness the return of Commodore (Nieuw-Vennep, The Netherlands). The company will show a series of new multimedia consumer PCs -- among them the P166 UltraMedia -- based on Intel's MMX processor technology.
Where to Find
Cardline Twin, SwissMod
Telelink AG
Cham, Switzerland
Phone: +41 41 7481080
Fax: +41 41 7481081
E-mail:
100536.2044@compuserve.com
Internet:
http://www.telelink.ch
What's Hot at CeBIT 97
