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...

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!