Where are the blog posts?

Some have noticed that my blogging rate has slowed down in the last few weeks. It's been extraordinarily busy at Sangoma. But I'm glad to report all the hard work we put in marketing is really paying off. Interest in our company has never been higher, and we continuously have new channels and applications using our products...

What I lack in blog entry posts, I make up in interviews it seems. So let me just point to some recent posts here:

- Interview with Kerry Garrison at VoIPStore:
http://www.voipstore.com/2009/07/interview-with-serge-forest-vp-marketing-for-sangoma/
- Article by VoIP Planet:
http://www.voipplanet.com/news/article.php/3825246

Of course, I continue providing regular updates on Twitter, so if you want more up-to-the-minute information, please follow me at: http://twitter.com/sergeforest

I'll be off the blogs for a few weeks. I'll be taking a vacation at the end of next week. This year, the family is driving along the coast in California. I'll be back on the blog scene in early August...

Using Skype from a Legacy PBX

Skype has become one of the most attractive ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Provider) out there. In many geographies, its usage is now prevalent by consumers and is gaining substantial adoption in the enterprise. The problem with current corporate usage is that Skype is rarely integrated with other business communications infrastructure. That means that users deploy Skype on their desktop and call their contacts “peer-to-peer” or make long distance calls using Skype-Out. Of course, when you are doing that, your regular phone system is not “aware” that you are on a call so it cannot forward new calls to voice mail automatically (or whatever other logic you may have programmed in your PBX), or transfer/conference calls using internal PBX extensions, etc. Also, you don’t have integrated reporting of all your communications from a billing and resource usage perspective. Bottom line, you end up using two orthogonal business communication systems.

At CommunicAsia this week, PrettyMay, a maker of Skype PBX and Skype PBX Gateway systems that helps integrating Skype into business communications, is announcing their partnership with Sangoma. They have built a complete PBX system based on Skype. So all the features that are expected from a PBX can be used with Skype phones and external connectivity is done with a mix of Skype network, along with the good old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). A lot of companies love Skype, but they want to keep a few traditional lines for external access, for 911 or fallback perspective. PrettyMay has integrated Sangoma voice cards for the interface to the PSTN.

PrettyMay also has a Skype PBX Gateway that allows to connect a legacy PBX to the external Skype network. PrettyMay’s system integrates Sangoma’s voice cards to “bridge” lines that look to the PBX like PSTN lines, but in fact connect to the Skype network. This way, Skype can be used transparently as an ITSP for any customer out there with a legacy PBX. All PBX features remain, but Skype is used for transport on a few lines of the PBX, therefore saving on telecom costs.

But PrettyMay is not the only company with a Skype-to-PBX gateway. Back in February, IndustryDynamics launched their VoiceGear product line, integrating Sangoma telephony cards to provide a seamless interface between the Skype network and legacy PBX’es. IndustryDynamics supports both analog and digital PBX interfaces, increasing the number of potential integrations. The company is working hard to increase its distribution network and I think they will get great success with their product in the coming months and years. In particular, they have worked hard on explaining the detailed business case for enterprises to use their product. Check out their ROI models at:

http://www.industrydynamics.ca/business_cases.php

Overall, it’s exciting seeing companies bridge the gap between Skype and legacy PBX systems. It’s even more exciting that the industry seems to be standardizing on Sangoma to provide the telephony interface!

Sangoma and Open Source Telephony

Sangoma's roots are in Open Source. The company has invested significantly to be a dominant board vendor in this space.

Alex and his team at Halo, one of Sangoma's long time business partners, has written a great article on his own analysis of the two main players for PCI cards in the Asterisk market: Sangoma and Digium. I'm obviously biased, but his analysis looks very thorough and sound. Have a read and decide for yourself:

http://www.halokwadrat.pl/sangoma-vs.-digium.html

Also, Sangoma is not exclusive to Asterisk. Sangoma is very active in other major open source telephony projects such as FreeSwitch, Call Weaver, Yate, etc. There are rumours that FreeSwitch is getting attention from major industry players, which might lead one to believe they will become a very important player in the space in the near future...I'm just reporting on rumours here. See Tony's blog at:

http://schmoozecom.blogspot.com/


Last minute edit: Actually, the rumours have been clarified in this interview:

http://www.voipstore.com/2009/06/interview-with-anthony-minessale-from-freeswitch/

Still, we can see that FreeSwitch is becoming more and more important in the community...

So to all of you open source developers out there. Why not choose the independent PCI card vendor that brings quality and innovation to all major open source telephony projects out there? Would you lock yourself with a supplier that may compete with you or who's products only work with specific open source projects?

NetBorder Express 2.0 GA is coming

In February, Sangoma announced that NetBorder Express (NBE) Gateway 2.0 was in Beta. Well...it took a bit more time than expected, but we will be ready later this week to release the General Availability version.

The product has received significant attention from customers during the Beta phase, and is highly anticipated by application partners and resellers alike. With a ubiquitous SIP interface, NBE enables low-cost, inside-the-server connectivity to software-based communication applications. The IP-PBX market is right on target for this important new release, with the following main additions to the product line:

- Support for analog cards. There are a lot of small and mediuam businesses out there that need a few analog lines for deployments of their corporate communication systems. Previous versions of NBE enabled T1/E1 configurations (up to 960 ports per system). But now, with configurations as low as 4 FXO analog ports, the solution scales down to address one of the widest market segment. We have seen very strong interest from the Windows-based PBX vendors and their resellers for such configurations. For any vendor that targets the SME market for PBX systems, analog support is a must, so everyone is very eager to get this launched...

- Installation wizard and enhanced management interface. We heard customer feedback from the previous release, load and clear. Customers wanted a simpler and more straightforward interface to get the solution installed, configured and maintained. We delivered. Beta customer feedback has been terrific. Customers really like the smooth configuration process and the ease-of-use. Further, the interface provides even more capabilities for tight integration between the application and the gateway. This allows our partners to design PBX systems that look like one complete, unified system.

- A series of improvements in tone processing. This includes better international tone support, processing of pre-connect tones, custom tone definition template, etc. This allows to catch more real-life deployment conditions in a reliable and deterministic fashion.

Some of our partners have created custom integrations to NBE 2.0, so they will be fully ready to embrace the GA release later this week. We also have key distributors and resellers implementing special promotions specifically around this product launch. With all this ground work already in place, we hope for immediate success from this product release.

Of course, I'll make sure to keep everyone informed...

A virtual job...

Could it be the end of tradeshows as we know it? Tomorrow, May 12, Sangoma will participate in its first ever virtual tradeshow. We have been invited by Intel to have a "booth" in their virtual tradeshow called the Intel Embedded eVent (http://intelembeddedevent.com/). It's a pretty cool concept that mimics real life, and that is starting to become adopted by a lot of tradeshow organizations. You can attend keynote sessions, network with peers and 'walk' the virtual tardeshow floor. At companies' booths, you can see product demonstrations and collateral, and even chat online with booth staff. So I'll be on my very first virtual booth duty all day tomorrow.

At the 'show', Sangoma will present how our product line, together with Intel platforms, make ideal building blocks for software-based PBX systems. I stronly encourage everyone to go in during the day and 'drop by the booth' for an online chat.

The virtual tradeshow approach, I find, presents a lot of interesting aspects:
- A lot more people can attend the events due to 'zero cost' of attendance and perhaps even more importanly, the fact that people don't have to loose a few days of work to attend
- The event stays online for a long time, so you don't have to put in all the work in your marketing organization for only 2-3 days of show
- You can present more stuff since you don't have to physically ship all your demos
- You never get a 'bad location' for your booth.
- Booth 'teardown' consists of logging out
- I can perform my booth duty at home, sitting down, unshaven and in my pyjamas if I want ;)

What will be interesting is to see how the event is attended and if booth 'traffic' is good. I am also eager to see the dynamics. Will people engage with booth staff? I promise to report on our experience.

Of course, nothing beats a face-to-face meeting and a hand-shake. I suspect real-life tradeshows will still live for a long time. But in a tough economic and full flu season, going virtual will be very popular I think.

Orlando-bound

For a 5th year in a row, I'm heading to Genesys' G-Force user conference. For those who have lived on another planet the last 15 years, Genesys is a leading Call Center software vendor, a subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent. This year the conference is in Orlando. Wow, what a difference 5 years make. I remember my first conference. I was the sole representative or a 4-person company at the time, Paraxip. Still, there was enough interest from the company and its customer to have a very productive conference, that generated very interesting business for our little operation.

Fast-forward 5 years and now we are a key Gvalidated component of some of the most important and prestigious Genesys IP Contact Center deployments, all over the world. On top of being one of the exhibitors to show our products, the Genesys booth itself will have a few demos running with our underlying technology (NetBorder Gateway, Call Analyzer and Agent Bridge). Furthermore, we are now sponsoring/exhibiting as Sangoma Technologies (we were previously going to the conference as Paraxip), and I'm now going there as VP Marketing of Sangoma (TSXV:STC).

It's really amazing to see the growth we've been able to create inside Genesys and within their channel and customer base. I firmly believe that very large companies such as Genesys have no choice but to embrace partnerships with smaller tech companies in order to continue bringing innovation to their market. I'm just glad Genesys 'got it' and that we were there at the right time and with the right solution.

While I'm in Orlando, I can't afford not to go visit one of my earliest and favorite customer: Voxeo. I can't wait to see what Jonathan, RJ and the gang are up to these days. I've been impressed with their launch of their new telephony in the cloud offering: tropo.com. In case you have not seen it, go check it out. They are really taking a serious attempt at tackling the long tail (in the marketing distribution sense) of programmers who know nothing about telephony but who surely have great ideas of new services and applications to develop. They have made it so simple, even I could write a telephony app in their cloud...No comment please!

Hopefully, the weather there is better than in Montreal, and I can have dinner on a terrasse one of the nights.

The Scale of Evil

Google's famous company motto "Don't be evil" was evolved a couple of years ago by the search giant to an 'evil scale' that allowed company operatives to accept "small evils" to allow for greater good. The notion of 'evil' here refers to doing something not exactly according to your purest principles in order to gain a business advantage.


Let's face it. In business, decisions are not always black and white, and there is often temptation to bend the rules a bit for an immediate gain. For instance, one could be tempted to bypass your regular channel for a specific large opportunity in order to increase margin on that deal, or take a quick sale from a customer even though you think the product might not be a perfect fit for what he/she is trying to do. So every business in fact operates on an evil scale, sometimes being more evil, sometimes being less evil. In general, being less evil pays up, but in the (very) long term. Some companies are unfortunately tempted to take a shortcut sometimes...:)

I like Sangoma's position on that scale. The company treats its customers fairly and makes sure the channel is rewarded from working us. That's different from other companies in our industry. In particular, some companies in the open source telephony market have recently tried to increase their business at the expense of their long-standing partners, by offering competing products. Ouch! That gives them a few points on the evil scale. Will the move pay off for them? The market is already rumbling. In the long run, I think the less evil will prevail. Oh well, time will tell.

Insourcing: Is anybody home?

So the economy is bad. Unemployment reaches record highs. Competition everywhere is fierce. What can businesses do in such a climate?

Well, many of our North American customers are accelerating their insourcing plans. "What's insourcing?" you may ask. It means taking call center agents that were outsourced to some developing country, and bringing these agents back in North America, most often having agents work from their homes. It's a trend that certainly benefits from the recent availability of a great number of workers in North America. Some of these people may be a bit less demanding these days in terms of salaries and benefits. With new technologies like our NetBorder Agent Bridge, it becomes easier than ever to add agents working from their home to a centralized call center. This means call centers can recruit and enable agents working from their home faster than ever.

Insourcing is great from the perspective of giving employment opportunities locally, and in assisting corporations to reduce their costs and improve the quality of their service in an increasingly competitive market. Perhaps a part of an economic recovery plan that was overlooked?

Nobody ever got fired from buying Cisco. Really???

There's an old belief that you can't go wrong by selecting a technology supplier that is the large incumbent. The "safe bet" if you are willing to pay some hefty premium in IT services is IBM. In VoIP connectivity, this would be Cisco.

But the decision is not quite that easy, especially these days. While it's true that one has to choose a vendor that has solid financials and will be around for the next little while, businesses today need to spend their money wisely and select vendors that will stay flexible and keep up with rapidly changing conditions. What good is it to pay twice the price of other solutions for the "safe bet", when you won't be able to get personalized service and will not be able to get the attention you need when your plans change (and they will!).

I remember one of our early customers. A company that hosted CRM applications and needed VoIP gateways. The particular business unit we were working with selected our company originally because of our domain expertise and the belief they could get much better service and more cost effective solutions than the "safe bets" out there. And they did! They had very successful deployments and grew their hosted infrastructure quite a bit. In fact, they were victims of their own success. One day, I received a call from my contact in their business unit telling me they were transitioning all their hosted infrastructure to "corporate IT". Oh boy. These guys only knew Cisco and wouldn't bother with a "small supplier" like us. Well, one guy made the decision to buy all new Cisco gear, and move all the hosted infrastructure on Cisco. It took them 4 motnhs to "reprogram" all the routing logic using Cisco. Because Cisco does not have a product that is as flexible as ours, it added quite a bit of management complexity, making the architecture difficult to maintain. But hey...who were we to argue...

A few months later I met my contact at a conference. Because of all the extra complexity introduced, their infrastructure had sufffered major quality problems that affected the end users. And guess what, the guys who was responsible for displacing our product for Cisco got fired because of that!!!

Especially these days, when money is really tight and the need for flexibility is higher than ever, the "safe bet" is no longer the "no brainer" choice it was before. Nobody ever got fired from buying Cisco??? I think not...

Starting my own blog

Well, it's about time I join the 21st century and start a blog of my own. I will use this platform to provide my thoughts on what's happening in my company (Sangoma Technologies -TSXV:STC)), thoughts on the VoIP industry, and any other topic I would find relevant and interesting.

Sangoma acquired the company I co-founded (Paraxip Technologies) in July 2008. It's been a wild ride, and it's not over yet...

My name is Serge Forest, and hopefully these comments will find a few interested readers...

Talk to you soon...