As part of Intel in the late 1990’s the Dialogic division saw a window into the incredible processing power of the forthcoming Intel CPUs and decided to port the media processing DSP functions such as echo cancel, play/record, codec creation, conferencing and speech processing, to name a few, to the Intel processor.

When I’m meeting with customers, usually I do a brief overview of our product line.  While we have all the cool software and NFV and AWS based network infrastructure, we also have some more traditional products.   And when our customers find out we sell Signaling Transfer Points (STP) and other SS7 products, they sometimes are astounded these nodes are still being sold.

As Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) takes hold, which means there are key communications infrastructure nodes running your business that are now out of your physical control because they are running in the cloud, the ability to understand how these nodes are performing is more critical than ever. 

As more and more enterprises are turning away from CPE based equipment to cloud-based services, Infrastructure as a Service is becoming more prevalent.  One of the key infrastructure nodes that will be required on these enterprise IP-based virtual networks will be SBCs.  These SBCs will still be required to serve their traditional roles including securing the network border and media transcoding for the cloud-based services, such as Unified Communications, that they support.  

Last year, I refrained from making any telecom predictions.   And no one complained.  And this year I was content to continue down that path.  However, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse regarding making 2018 predictions for the Fast Mode 2018 Trends and Outlook, so I did. The full article is linked below.

A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to speak at TechXLR8 Asia in Singapore.  It was a dynamic conference covering topics such as 5G and IoT.  I spoke about the convergence of IoT and Real Time Communications, which we’re already starting to see.

Many of us are familiar with the concept of value-added services in communications.  That is, what can enhance a basic voice or video call enough that a subscriber would be willing to spend more on it?  For example, call recording or conferencing or prepaid charging or even getting a daily joke are examples of that.   Or a service provider for example will to spend for ad insertion or codec transcoding.

The same concept of value added services goes for IoT. 

The future contact center is an exciting place.  Artificial Intelligence will be front and center.  The elements of some of this exist today.

This past summer, I wrote a few blogs relating to older technologies such as PSTN, SS7, Fax, etc.  At Dialogic, part of what we do is live in the world of bridging these older technologies to today.  The older technologies live on longer than any of us might imagine, and we have customers who still buy these technologies for various reasons – all revolving around the networks still being used, no matter how much we hear about LTE. And thus, there is business for them and thus, us to be had.

SIP endpoints such as softphones / headsets used for IP based enterprise VoIP calls,  for WiFi calls, and for calls from third party communication apps such as WhatsApp, Viber etc. are becoming the norm. And with continued integration on the phone side (see Apple CallKit), these will continue to proliferate.