One striking thing about the current state of the softswitch market is that there are so many different vendors supplying softswitches. By and large, these are equipment vendors -- not, in other words, pure-play vendors banking on the underlying idea that softswitches should be able to run on just about any fault-resilient PC hardware. It's staggering, in a way, that so many companies have had to come up with a softswitch of their own as a way of selling the underlying hardware.

The truth is, though, many of the vendors aren't starting from scratch. A great deal of the software underlying current softswitch offerings comes from creators of underlying protocol stacks and the like. A key vendor in this arena is Hughes Software Systems (Haryana, India -- 91-124-6346666, www.hssworld.com).

If you look at our Softswitch Vendor Roundup, you'll notice that Hughes is listed with the caveat that they don't sell their own softswitch. But they do sell software subsystems and protocol stacks for nearly ever niche in the softswitch ecosystem.

The company, a subsidiary of the giant Hughes Electronics, makes all the pertinent protocol stacks, for instance, including MEGACO, MGCP/NCS, a SIP stack, SCTP, M3UA, M2UA, SUA, M2Peer, IUA, H.323, SS7, V5.2/VB5, and GR.303.

At a higher level of software abstraction, the company also offers a range of VoIP developer toolkits, which hide the complexities of the underlying protocols behind simpler interfaces that focus on needed sets of functionality.

Finally, the company provides complete frameworks for SIP agents, media gateways, and a softswitch. Ajay Gupta, who heads HSS U.S. operations, says "The pieces are between 70% and 95% ready for use, depending on how much a vendor wants to customize the product."