Doug on IP Comm » Dialogic

Dialogic, Veraz complete merger – now what?

Doug Mohney — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 22:41:50 +0000

Dialogic (www.dialogic.com) and Veriz Networks have completed their merger. Now that Dialogic is still, well, Dialogic, but with a new NASDAQ ticker symbol, it’ll be interesting to see what CEO/Chairman of the Board Nick Jensen and company do in the next 12 to 24 months. It’ll also be interesting to look at the financials of the new entity moving forward.

The merged company is now HQ’ed in San Jose, former home of Veraz Networks, with former Veraz President/CEO Doug Sabella now the President and COO of the new entity. There are about 31 million shares of Dialogic stock outstanding (floating around) as of yesterday.

Jensen has had the Big Vision about video – especially video on mobile devices – and mobile for quite a while. He was also not show about saying that size matters when it comes to working with service providers, stating those customers wanted to deal with a stable and large company with plenty of revenue that wasn’t going away overnight.

SBCs and media servers seem to be the hot tickets the analysts are plugging, with a quote out of Infonetics saying that worldwide 2Q10 revenues for the SBC market are up 27 percent sequentially and up 70 percent over 2Q09.

Needless to say, Jensen has some nice currency – NASDAQ stock – to go shopping for more things to add to the portfolio, but I don’t think he’s in any rush to go on a shopping spree anytime soon. There are several IP communications companies that have overextended themselves and need some more cash so they can continue to operate.

Dialogic, Continuous Computing show off 2,000 port software-based solution

Doug Mohney — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 19:36:42 +0000

Dialogic (www.dialogic.com) and Continuous Computing (www.ccpu.com) have put together a 2,000 port carrier-class audio conferencing solution running on a single ATCA blade – no DSPs required!

The solution was put together with Continuous Computer’s FlexCompute ATCA-XE80 12-core compute blade jacked up to 20 percent faster than other ATCA blades with a pair of Intel “Westmere” processors. Dialogic’s PowerMedia IP Media server sat on top of the blade

Since you can can pack a bunch of ATCA blades in a multi-U box, there’s the potential to scale up to 24,000 ports in a 13U ATCA chassis.

This has to give the dedicated DSP guys a bit of heartburn for their future prospects in the voice processing world.

Dialogic intros Enterprise SBC and Media Gateway Products

Doug Mohney — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:11:00 +0000

Dialogic (www.dialogic.com) has introduced Enterprise Session Border Control (SBC) and Media Gateway products this month.

The turnkey BorderNet 500 Gateways are designed to enable rapid development of SIP-based communications services and widespread delivery of SIP trunking and hosted SIP services with a single border element (i.e box) to work on nearly any enterprise network architecture and customer premise communications system (i.e. PBX).

BorderNet 500 Gateways are the first products available in the new Dialogic BorderNet family, combining enterprise SBC functionality with “any-to-any” media gateway functionality, so businesses can get with SIP even if still on a legacy TDM/PSTN infrastructure.

SBC features of the BorderNet 500 Gateways include secure firewall traversal of real-time SIP traffic through the enterprise network edge –- well, that’s what you’d expect with SBCs – as well as SIP interoperability tools and configuration templates for over 40 carriers. Optional interfaces and protocols are available for T1/E1, PRI, CAS, ISDN BRI PSTN and PBX protocols and interfaces. BorderNet 500 Gateways also deliver SIP security at the network edge, greatly reducing the threat of denial of service attacks, SPAM and SPIT attacks, in addition to a number of other SIP security concerns. The enterprise-class BorderNet 500 Gateways are available in multiple 1U rack mountable chassis configurations.

Veraz (soon to be Dialogic) lands big GlobalCrossing win

Doug Mohney — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:44:57 +0000

Veraz Networks (www.veraznetworks.com) – soon to be merged with Dialogic (www.dialogic.com) has landed a big win in Latin America. The company’s ControlSwitch platform is being used by Global Crossing (www.globalcrossing.com) to interconnect networks in several Latin American countries.

Global Crossing is in the process of simplifying the management of its Latin American network. Veraz’s ControlSwitch provides the ability to centralize management functions, providing customers with improved response times.

Open interfaces on ControlSwitch enable GlobalCrossing to integrate its installed base of media getaways and legacy third party apps, so customers get service continuity.

Dialogic goes software wild

Doug Mohney — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:02:51 +0000

Dialogic (www.dialogic.com) has unleashed a raft of software-based products this month along with a cloud-based developer network/service.

The software announcements – four total, two updates, two new products – are all grouped under the PowerMedia media processing family/brand.

PowerMedia IP Media Server (IPMS) and Host Media Processing (HMP) software should be familiar to Dialogic users. IPMS includes the latest and greatest in videotranscoding, transrating, and transizing for H.263 and H.264 codecs and RTSP clients, as well as support for real-time ad insertion and other info using text overlays. HMP features newly released H.264 and HD voice codecs for media processing tasks on general purpose (i.e. off-the-shelf Intel-based) servers.

PowerMedia Web Media Server (WMS) is a new server-based software product to enable “extensive” media processing capabilities to web apps using industry-standard web interfaces, so service providers and web programmers can drop in real-time multimedia communications capabilities to their apps. Features include audio/video play/record, audio/video conferencing, and text overlay.

And to wrap it up, PowerMedia Media Server Connector (MSC) connects Java EE Applications Servers to the PowerMedia IMPS using JSR 309. The MSC enables audio processing features such as audio play/record, simple conference mixing and basic prompts and digit collection.

Developers can tap into Dialogic’s newly announced and FREE inCloud9 network to work with PowerMedia IPMS and WMS. The inCloud9 network provides applications developers with access to products, technical documentation and support for creating new voice and video-enabled value-added services – can you say Evo and iPhone 4 here? – without requiring local server hardware or a development environment.

There’s a bunch of third party products also available and Dialogic intends to add other Dialogic and third-party products to inCloud9 later this year. Cool, eh?

Developers can also get access to video training demos and sample code for a bunch of different applications ranging from Video Mail to Open VXML.

Dialogic and Veraz Networks “merge”

Doug Mohney — Thu, 13 May 2010 03:27:10 +0000

The economy must be getting back to normal – Dialogic (www.dialogic.com) is “merging” with publicly-traded Veraz Networks.

Once the deal closes, the name of the final entity will be Dialogic. Current Dialogic CEO and Chairman of the Board Nick Jensen won’t have to change business cards; he will be Chairman of the Board and CEO of the final entity. Current Veraz Networks President and CEO Doug Sabella will be President and COO. Corporate HQ will be in San Jose, California.

The merger provides the “old” Dialogic with two things – new products and a publicly traded stock. Veraz Networks has switching and bandwidth optimization products and services in 130 service providers in over 80 countries.

When the deal closes sometime in the second half of 2010, Dialogic shareholders will own 70 percent of the new company while Veraz Networks peeps will have 30 percent. The merged company’s revenues are expected to be greater than $250 million with gross margins of 60 to 65 percent and EBDITA of 10 to 15 percent of revenues.

It is also “expected” that the merged company will continue to be traded on NASDAQ – and if it didn’t, I’d be real surprised.

Dialogic, Ingate team for PBX SIP trunking

Doug Mohney — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:54:55 +0000

Among the news I’m catching up on from IT EXPO East 2010 is the team up between Dialogic and Ingate to build Ingate’s SIP Trunking software module into a new enterprise border element designed to connect “virtually any” (well, it is virtual…) SIP trunk with virtually any PBX.

Goodness is expected in seamless SIP trunk deployments in legacy TDM and hybrid PBX environments, as well as new SIP-based PBX systems. Ingate’s SIP trunking software module provides enterprise session border control (SBC) along with advanced routing capabilities for connecting SIP trunks to enterprise networks and branch offices by using Ingate’s proxy-based traversal and security technology. The software is also designed to resolve interop issues between service provider SIP services and the SIP-based systems being deployed inside corporate data networks.

Dialogic’s contribution is media gateway technologies to provide the protocols and interfaces necessary to connect to a wide variety of legacy phone and network equipment, both TDM and IP. The new enterprise border element from Dialogic will combine the functions normally found in a media gateway and an enterprise session border controller into a single product.

Dialogic plans to make a first set of enterprise border elements available later this year, with configurations offering SIP trunking, legacy PBX connectivity through the usual suspects (PRI/E1/T1 and ISDN BRI).

HD voice news from AstriCon via HDConnectNow

Doug Mohney — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:47:26 +0000

You’ll find three (3) pieces about HD voice from AstriCon over at the HD Connect Now website (www.hdconnectnow.org)–

Bottom line: You have to look REALLY hard to find a VoIP handset that doesn’t have support for the G.722 wideband codec these days. Even Cisco’s $130 cheap-end VoIP phone has G.722 built in… and yes, I’m sure people are going to start nit-picking about mic quality, speaker quality, does the gear really sample at 16 KHz, etc… we’ll see.

Also very interesting that AT&T is quietly trialing HD voice in its back yard. No details yet on exactly what is going on; I’m hoping the company will be as forthcoming as Verizon Business, but then again, AT&T never rolled out Casabi after playing with it nearly a decade ago..

Dialogic, Digium get social

Doug Mohney — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:52:46 +0000

Dialogic and Digium have recently launched online communities to stimulate applications development for their respective products. Digium is providing code, while Dialogic is offering prizes for new apps.

The Dialogic Exchange Network (DEN) and the Dialogic Innovator Award [Yours truly as one of the award judges] were launched in late April. DEN is an online social networking community for customers, developers, Dialogic employees and others to connect, share ideas, learn about industry trends, and do the whole forum thing.

If you get a good idea from DEN for developing a new application, the Dialogic Innovator Award Contest awaits. The most innovative application built using Dialogic components gets a free one-year service and support contact, $5000 credit to a future purchase of Dialogic products, t-shirts, press releases, and a joint marketing opportunity with the company.

Over at Digium, Switchvox Developer Central was launched last week. The website provides a wiki containing documentation for the Switchvox Extend API, a forum for discussions, a blog for the Digium engineering team, and tools for development and testing.

The big deal out of this is the exposure of the Switchvox Extend API. Third-party developers (i.e. either the do-it-yourself admin or a VAR/system integrator) can now go integrate their phone system with a custom web app. It opens up a world of Switchvox-tailored vertical applications and ad hoc mashups.