software assets

The key enablers for software assets to converge successfully voice, video, and data over packet-switched infrastructures were QoS technologies. QoS allows for the differentiated treatment of data traffic versus voice and other delay-sensitive traffic. In other words, it allows the network to include a system of "managed unfairness." As QoS technologies evolved, increasing numbers of enterprises saw the value of a single-network infrastructure and began planning toward deploying converged networks.

The first attempt to standardize QoS came in the mid-1990s, when the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published the Integrated Services Request For Comments (IntServ RFCsstarting with RFC 1633 in June 1994). These RFCs centered on a signaling protocol called the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP). RSVP signals bandwidth and latency requirements for each discrete session to each node along a path (logical circuit) that packets would take from the sending endpoint to the receiving endpoint. Initially, RSVP required every node to heed its reservations, which was highly impractical over the Internet, on which servers, switches, and software assets of every description, vintage, and vendor coexist.