I was driving to work this week and encountered a fair bit of traffic one morning.  I would imagine many of us do to one extent or another.  I often deal with some that seems to always occur in certain parts of my commute, though on this day the traffic was unbearable.

The Brooktrout Fax Products SDK 6.8 is the latest Brooktrout development kit providing feature rich capabilities to our partners.  We’ve added some new features that will be quite useful, and I will discuss a couple of them on what they do and why they can help you.

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.

Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) are increasingly investing in their own infrastructure. Why?  Because running on someone else’s mobile network and trying to differentiate via marketing / branding isn’t good enough anymore.  So MVNO’s are putting in some of their own infrastructure to use with the host network to create functional differentiation in addition to the marketing differentiation. 019 Telzar in Israel has recently done this, and it resulted in a 50% increase in its customer base in 5 months. Mobile Virtual Network Enablers (MVNEs) have also emerged to supply the infrastructure differentiation to the MVNO’s, so the MVNO itself doesn’t have to invest in the infrastructure.

Everyone is talking about UC these days.  But what is it?  And why hasn’t everyone deployed it yet?

First of all, UC is a murky topic.  Unified Communications at it’s most basic level is voice, email and presence/IM capability in an application.   And some companies are very particular about saying they have UC apps because they have the basic ones.  But UC can also mean voice conferencing, video conferencing, text messaging, collaboration / document sharing, and fax.   And this contributes to different price points and target market fit. 

Back in March, I wrote a blog about the PSTN sunset. But in reality legacy technologies are still in use.  I know this since we still sell them. Certainly, IP is growing and SIP Trunking is growing, but for most companies this means a gradual transition, not a full scale wipeout of existing technology.

Last week, I had the pleasure to meet with most of our Japanese fax customers in Tokyo.  Fax, like many PSTN technologies, continues to endure and keep going way past what the “pundits” may have predicted.  To me, that is because the pundits live in a very advanced world, and don’t understand how economics really shape enterprise business decisions. 

I come across many business plans that utilize the Cisco VNI, and these business plans and business often speak of it as gospel.  I’ve even seen other analyst reports refer to the Cisco VNI as well.  The Cisco VNI has been a great tool for many of us in the industry, and I have been reading it for as long as it’s been available, which is at least 10 years running.  And it’s a great tool for sure, one of the best. 

But is it right? 

International Telecoms Week (ITW) is where all the interconnect carriers come to work out minutes exchange pricing and routes.   Dialogic has had a consistent presence for over 15 years -  not because we do any minutes exchange, but because we have a large customer base of carriers using our softswitches and SBCs that do. As such, just like MWC, this is a great place to meet with our customers and prospects.

But this is a challenging industry.