Sun Microsystems Inc is the latest Unix vendor to bring integrated voice mail, facsimile, electronic mail and video support to its systems. The Mountain View, California-based company’s Sun-Soft Inc unit says it will make available a set of telephony services and application programming interfaces for creating applications using these technologies for the next release of its Solaris Unix operating system on Sparc and iAPX-86 architectures. XTL Teleservices, as they are called, will feature in Live!, SunSoft’s multimedia set for Solaris. SunSoft says that it expects the services to enable independent software vendors to create telephone-based applications and telecommunications hardware for the computer-integrated telephony market, which Sun estimates to be worth in the region of $6,900m a year currently. SunSoft says that it will offer up the application programming interfaces to unspecified emerging telephony standards groups for use. Included with the XTL Teleservices development environment will be the DOE Distributed Objects Everywhere middleware in order to ensure that applications will be supported under Sun’s future NeXTstep-based object-oriented environment. Developers’ kits are out now.
