IT Expo East in Miami

It's a busy week this week. I'm at the Internet Telephony Expo East 2010 in Miami. We have the tradeshow where we have 6 application partners and 2 distributors in our booth (#601, please drop by if you are in Miami), a side Latin America partner 'mini-conference', several briefings with analysts and media representatives, as well as countless other partner and customer meetings. So far, it's a very successful and busy conference for Sangoma.


And on top of that, we've just completed our third major announcement for this week. Let's do a quick recap of the announcements.

• Tuesday: Sangoma helps IndustryDynamics Enter Key Vertical Markets. Skype, corporate IP Telephony, existing PBX'es... Ever wondered how leading Hospitality and Education organizations can actually leverage the combination of these diverse technologies, as opposed to simply being overwhelmed by them? Sangoma and IndustryDynamics are announcing significant customer adoption of the VoiceGear Solution, which integrates Skype seamlessly with other types of corporate communications, in the education and hospitality verticals.
• Wednesday: inConcert Integrates NetBorder Call Analyzer to Boost Productivity of Outbound Call Centers. Following on the recent customer wins for Sangoma's NetBorder Call Analyzer product, this most recent announcement unveils that inConcert, a leading Contact Center solution provider in Latin America, is now also standardizing on our leading Call Progress Analysis (CPA) capabilities. NetBorder provides the world's most advanced CPA, which leads to improved automation of outbound calling campaigns and significant operational cost reductions in our customers' call centers.
• Thursday: Sangoma Renews Commitment to the FreeSWITCH IP Telephony Open Source Project. Sangoma increases its support of the FreeSWICTH project, because we believe this is one of the best projects out there for telephony developers. The scale and breadth of applications that can be developed on FreeSWITCH seems unmatched, so we believe at Sangoma that it's important for us to nurture the project and its community.

Overall, it's a very important week for Sangoma to kick off 2010. This week's announcement all go in the same direction: Sangoma thrives in enabling our application partners develop new applications that deliver true business value to enterprises and contact centers...

The great big fish...

Today, Sangoma proudly announced that we are partnering with internet security giant Barracuda Networks to deliver a new set of IP-PBX appliances, via their wholly owned subsidiary Cudatel. This is unchartered territory for Barracuda in the voice world, but I think they’ll be as successful as they have been in other segments. Barracuda is getting into the market very wisely. They focus on their core competency, which is to design, manufacture and market tightly integrated appliances that solve critical business problems with great ease-of-use and cost effectiveness. They have a long-standing tradition of tapping into and contributing to open source projects, and this most recent project is no exception. Barracuda has partnered with the FreeSWITCH project. It’s a very high-quality communication software platform that Sangoma has been supporting for years. We’re glad to see a professional organization like Barracuda embrace and support a quality open source project like FreeSWITCH. This a clear win for both organizations, and I think both will grow significantly from their association.

We’re very proud to say that Sangoma will supply the telephony cards inside the Cudatel appliances. With our small form-factor, unmatched compatibility / wide protocol support within FreeSWTICH, and our quality hardware design, we were meant to live inside that appliance…

So watch out for two things in the coming months: Barracuda will aggressively market this new appliance and enter the big world of voice communications; and we believe FreeSWITCH will blossom and grow quite fast as an open source telephony platform. And of course, Sangoma is a big part of both of these projects…

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?