Jim Machi is Senior Vice President of Marketing for Dialogic (News - Alert) Corporation, responsible for product planning, product management and marketing for all the company’s products. Dialogic develops open systems-based telephony voice, video and signaling products targeted for both the enterprise and service provider market segments.

 

I had the opportunity to catch up with Machi, a former Internet Telephony (News - Alert) magazine columnist and one of the magazine’s Top 100 Voices of IP Communications. He shared his insights on the state of the market, and what his company will be up to in 2008.

 

 

JM: There wasn’t a single biggest achievement for Dialogic in 2007. We are very pleased that our IP portfolio of products, and sales of those products, continues to grow. We are also very pleased about the successful integration of Intel’s (News - Alert) Media and Signaling business followed by the subsequent acquisition of Cantata. The Cantata deal immediately improved our market position and prospects for growth in our chosen markets.

 

JM: Over the course of 2008 you will see Dialogic bring products to market that enable our customers to provide the most innovative IP, Wireless, and Video solutions in the converged communication market. For instance, our advanced video products are rolling out now and you’ll see follow-on releases to that in 2008. You’ll also see more integrated media and signaling products. And, of course, you can expect to see Cantata efficiently integrated into Dialogic.

 

JM: Convergence means many things, but one thing for certain is that video is the latest form of media converging with voice and data over IP. Dialogic enables media processing, that’s what we do, and video is the latest form. The application possibilities are endless, and for sure there will be no shortage of content as folks all over the world are walking around with some sort of handheld device that can capture live content in video format.

 

JM: Still not perfect but SIP has enabled our customers to focus on what they do best — innovation in the enhanced application space — and not worry about set up and tear down of a call. I think 2008 will be the year of video for Dialogic. We’re seeing very exciting video application innovations coming to market from our customer base using our products.

 

JM: Worldwide telecom infrastructure spending in 2008 in both the service provider and enterprise space is forecast to be over $80B USD with year over year growth of over five percent. Without a doubt the fixed voice market will continue to decline. The savvy operators will find new revenue streams in the rapid growth of broadband and wireless data adoption, continuing to invest in new equipment supporting the rollout of these services. Continued VoIP adoption and intelligent networking will drive enterprise spending.

 

JM: The growth rates are about the same. There are certainly different markets around the world but overall we’re growing about the same in each geo.

 

JM: Dialogic enables innovative communications applications with our products. As such, we supply media and signaling technology that ultimately gets utilized in the service provider networks. So we’re natural allies.

 

JM: Dialogic is certainly taking the open source community seriously as we refine our corporate strategy. Many developers in the open source community may not even know the Dialogic name since the open source community largely developed while the Dialogic name was subjugated within Intel. Dialogic product can today be deployed in the open-source realm, most notably as an application platform to an existing PBX. We have created a marketing plan to reach those developers, so you’ll see us getting more active in that space in 2008.

 

JM: The richness of hosted telephony will go up with the advent of more and more IP networks. Hosted solutions are enabling a new breed of innovative mobile operators extend their brands without incurring associated infrastructure costs. This is a growth area for Dialogic and we will continue to focus on this area with multimedia servers and signaling servers that service the IP and wireless networks for both NGN networks and IMS networks.

 

JM: I don’t know but if I look back five years it’s not the same as it is today, so I certainly don’t expect it to be the same in five years. I’d expect continued consolidation. And I’d expect as IP continues it’s march forward, that different players from non-traditional telephony areas will become bigger players.

 

JM: There are many reasons. First of all, Dialogic enables our partners to create innovative communications solutions. And we don’t compete with our customers as we supply the underlying engines for our partners, not the applications. Our partners do that. Second, we’ve been doing this a long time and we know what we’re doing. We helped develop the first VoIP gateway, so we certainly have a lot of experience as customers migrate from the TDM world to IP. And third, Dialogic is easy to do business with. We’ve been doing this for almost 25 years, we have offices and support centers around the world, and we’ve shipped more than 45 million ports worldwide.

 

JM: TDM ports won’t decline at the rates of the past few years. IP will still continue to grow, but the TDM decline will flatten out.