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...

B601 Launch at Astricon

Today, Sangoma is announcing the launch of its newest hybrid telephony card at Astricon 2009 in Glendale Arizona. The new B601 integrates a Digital interface (T1/E1) with a few analog ports (4 FXO, 1 FXS) all on a single, small PCI/PCIe card. This allows PBX platform vendors to deliver solutions that are more compact and even more cost effective than before. Our partner Rockbochs has integrated the board in one of its Asterisk-based PBX appliances and is ready to take orders on an integrated box that includes this new card.

We’re also fortunate to have a few product reviews by some of our online retailer partners. Look for reviews to be posted on the web in the next while.

If you are a PBX system developer or reseller, you need to have a look at this product. Check it out at http://www.sangoma.com/products/hardware_products/digital_analog_hybrids/b601.html

Sangoma in Brazil

This week, Sangoma is participating in FutureCom in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The company has recently increased its presence and marketing efforts in Latin America and in particular in Brazil, with the announcement of a new distributor, the participation at two important tradeshows (Encontro VoIP Center in September and FutureCom this week), and some key customer announcements. Today, Sangoma is announcing that partner Digivox has deployed 6,000 ports of IVR based on Asterisk Open Source Telephony and Sangoma cards, at Banco do Brazil, the country's largest financial institution. The systems will processs 35 million cals per month. That is truly impressive...



Sangoma has had terrific customer successes in this country, from telephony operators using Sangoma's SS7-to-SIP solution to provide VoIP termination to both customers and enterprises, all the way to packaged PBX and IVR solutions built on our leading telephony interface cards. Unfortunately, we've been a bit too quiet about it and in my recent visit in Sao Paulo, I found that the Sangoma brand, although well respected, was not prevalent enough. People just did not know enough about our company and products. Further, it seemed that people had an impression that the products were costly and difficult to obtain in Brazil. With our new distributor ShopNetworks, the product is now readily available, fully serviced locally and now more affordable than ever. As for the lack of visibility from Sangoma, this is now changing rapidly, with key announcements and better participation in local events.



Digivox's deployment at Banco do Brazil is impressive and these guys have a lot more going on wth key financial institutions in Latin America. We'r glad to have them standardize their IVR and PBX solutions on Sangoma hardware. We're also convinced that a lot more companies will start seeing the benefit of open source telephony used in conjunction with our cards...

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…

NBE now available on Linux

Today, Sangoma launched its NetBorder Express (NBE) Gateway product on the Linux operating system. The Windows version has been available for a long time, and has been successfully integrated and deployed by leading application vendors worldwide. Here are just a few of the application vendors who have adopted NBE on Windows that we have announced in the recent months: 3CX, Brekeke, Dialexia, Genesys, PBXnSIP, VoiceServe, Voxeo, … And there are plenty of others that we can’t name at this time. Our Linux announcement today complements the products’ platform compatibility and will serve many Linux-based SIP applications.

One of the leading customers for this is pbxnsip. While Sangoma and pbxnsip have served joint customers in Windows for a while now, the Linux-based NBE takes the partnership to a whole new level. pbxnsip has been anticipating this NBE product to launch a new set of all-in-one, cost effective PBX appliances that are designed around NBE. Having a great customer launch products based on NBE for Linux is pretty cool way for us get out of the gate!

NBE provides telephony interfaces, from 2 analog ports all the way to 960 digital ports on a single system, to any SIP-based application. The product includes commercial telephony protocol stacks, a management interface for installation, configuration and control. Additionally, NBE offers users a flexible routing rules engine to implement SIP-based load balancing and failover. And the product talks standard SIP, so it can talk to any app that supports that protocol, whether it is a proprietary app or an open source app.

Of course, Sangoma telephony cards can still be used directly with popular open-source projects such as Asterisk, FreeSwitch and others without NetBorder Express; but if one wants the extra scalability (up to 960 ports per system), management and configurability, one can now choose to use NBE on Linux to interface with their Open Source applications, as opposed to the traditional interface for these cards (ZAPTEL and others). We think NBE is a great complement to open source telephony projects as well as commercial products.

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?

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.