1)  So, we understand Digium has released three new products recently.  Please provide a quick introduction to each product and its use?

Yeah, that’s right. We’ve actually been really busy. And I’ll start out by saying that this is just the beginning. We’ve really got just an amazing line up of products that you’ll be seeing hit the market over the next 6 months or so. But I’m going to talk right now about the three that we’ve already released.

The first of those is the TE820, which is the 8- port digital telephony interface card and that is capable of going up to 240 concurrent calls on a single card, which is our highest density card, and it’s really only priced a few hundred dollars over  our 4-port model, for an 8-port card. So it’s a pretty good deal.

Like the rest of our digital interface line, the TE820 can connect to T1, E1 or J1 circuits. It’s available in PCIe form factor, which has really become kind of the standard for servers over the last few years. And it is available either with or without hardware echo cancellation. We launched this back in November at Astricon and it’s been selling really well.

The next product is actually a whole new family of devices that we call the Redundancy Series, or R-Series Appliances. These are small 1U devices that act as sort of a switch for PSTN circuits. They basically allow you to set up a pair of identical Asterisk servers: one that is active and another that is standby. And then to move the PSTN servers between those two systems, normally the R-series connects the circuits through the Digium cards on the primary system, but in the event of a failure on the primary, the backup system will take over, and will command the R-Series to switch the lines over to the backup box. And we’ve actually got two versions of this.

The R800 is an analogue version for doing POTS circuits, and the R850 is a digital version for doing T1, E1 and BRI circuits.

The third product that we’ve released is actually Asterisk, called Asterisk 10. It’s the latest version of the Asterisk platform, which is our classic, our original reason for Digium being around. We announced this back at Astricon, and we released it just before Christmas. And if you’re familiar with Asterisk, you may be going, “Huh, wait a minute, Asterisk 10? I thought the last one was 1.8. What’s with the big jump?”

Well, we talked about it. And the next version was going to be 1.10, but a lot of people went, “Shouldn’t 1.10, be 2.0?” No, that’s not actually the way the version scheme works in open source.

But some people pointed out that a 1.x product is generally a pretty new and immature product. And Asterisk has been around for 12+ years at this point and is anything but new and immature. So after thinking about it, we decided to drop the leading 1 and just call it Asterisk 10. So next year we’ll have Asterisk 11 and so on.

So those are the three new products and we’re really happy to have them out in the market.

2)  What are the unique selling points compared with manufacturers that already have products that exist in this market?

Well the TE820 offers the highest port capacity at the lowest price of any card in the Asterisk market. If you’re running it in E1 mode, that’s where you’ve got 240 channels total, or 30 channels per span, the price breaks down to $7.00 per channel without echo cancellation or about $12.00 with. It also comes with our five year manufacturer’s warranty, our ESP guarantee, and it is coming straight from the guy that makes Asterisk.

The R-Series appliances, well they support up to eight lines, making them the highest density redundancy solution on the Asterisk market. They are aggressively priced. The street price for the R850 works out to roughly $100 a circuit. They are also deeply integrated with a whole suite of redundancy tools, to handle things like IP reallocation or file system synchronization, so they are really very powerful.

And Asterisk 10? Well, there really aren’t too many competitors out there for Asterisk. It is still the world’s leading open source telephony platform.

So the new features that we’ve added in include a completely re-built media engine that’s built for a post telephony HD world. We’ve updated the conferencing module, ConfBridge, to support wide-band audio. We’ve added a limited, but very powerful form of video conferencing. And Asterisk can now route text messages and text messages the way you can route calls. So that’s another big step forward for us. And we’ve also added better internet faxing with T.38 gateway support.

We’ve done a lot of other internal stuff, upgraded the database etc., so it’s a big leap forward, and we’re really happy to have Asterisk continuing to grow and to have a healthy evolving community.

3)  Why is there no FXS support, or support for Digium Switchvox, freepbx-based trixbox or Elastix in the Digium R series?

Well, our requirements for the R-series were really based on trunk requirements. So, the FXS and FXS port is of course a station port in the analog telephony world. And what we wanted to do is really be able to handle the primary-backup failover. So what we’ve set it up as is basically a trunk router, to route your trunks from the PSTN over.

Now in terms of the other sort of distributions that you mentioned, SwitchVox, Elastix, etc., I know we’re going to have support for Switchvox very soon. Usually a product takes a little while before we’re able to integrate it directly into the Switchvox. It takes the usual amount of engineering effort.

And in terms of trixbox and Elastix, that will be something an engineer could do. We’re hoping the teams from FreePBX or Elastix will do that with the R-Series. But we had to put out what we basically call a reference implementation. The implementation that we read about in the user guide is what we can easily support. It kind of takes the basics of doing true redundancy. And so, we can build it to that spec, we’re able to provide 100% support on it. But we fully understand that there are going to be people that are going to use it in slightly different means, and we’ll do our best, but that’s just the way it works when you are manufacturing something that is really complex like a redundancy solution.

4) Are there any new hardware developments at Digium or improvements you can tell us about that may be coming out in the future?

 Actually, I can’t tell you any details, but I can tell you that 2012 will be our biggest year yet for new products. The last two years have been years of incredible effort and investment, working towards new products that you’ll see released this year. Please keep your eye on Digium, I think you’ll see some really amazing stuff in the really near future.

Thanks again for your time today Steve. Steve Sokol, Digium’s Marketing Director for Asterisk.

This has been a VoIP Uncovered Podcast brought to you by VoIPon Solutions. For more information please visit www.voipon.co.uk.

TORONTO, ONTARIO–(Marketwire – Jan. 11, 2012) – Sangoma Technologies Corporation (TSX VENTURE:STC), a leading provider of hardware and software components that enable or enhance IP Communications Systems for both voice and data, today announced that that Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC), a global media company, has named its Vega 5000: Analog Media Gateway as a recipient of the 2011 INTERNET TELEPHONY Product of the Year Award.

“We are delighted that the editors and executives TMC and Internet Telephony Magazine have recognized the Vega 5000 for its reliability and flexibility in solving the interconnectivity issues that continually challenge network service providers and enterprises,” said Frederic Dickey, director of product management of Sangoma. “As more and more customers look to leverage cloud- and IP-based applications and features, gateways like the Vega 5000 will become an essential solution for connecting these emerging solutions with legacy hardware and network service.”

Designed to simplify the integration of legacy voice communications systems with an IP infrastructure, the Vega 5000 provides companies with a cost-effective option for leveraging new IP-based technologies within their existing infrastructure. The Vega 5000 is a 1u rack-mountable chassis supporting from 16 to 50 FXS ports for analog telephone stations, two FXO ports for PSTN connectivity, and full-duplex Ethernet connectivity to an IP infrastructure. It provides support for many popular voice codecs and protocols for voice, fax and modem connectivity, and has built-in enterprise-class calling and call control features such as least cost routing, call waiting, call forwarding, conference and hold. Designed to meet the requirements of telecom service providers, the Vega 5000 is certified to be connected to public and IP networks throughout the world.

According to Alexander Orlov, chief technology officer for ThreeLine, a telecommunications equipment provider located in Russia, the Vega 5000 is ideal for delivering robust voice services in high density residential deployments. "Our customers are very satisfied with both the reliability and cost-savings they’ve achieved by deploying the Sangoma Vega 5000 Gateway. This solution allows service providers and enterprises to extend the lifecycle of their existing network infrastructure, as well as roll out IP services to users. These capabilities have a very profound impact on their bottom line."

Sangoma provides an industry-leading portfolio of TDM to IP telephony interworking solutions, including award-winning boards, transcoding and gateway software, and standalone gateway appliances designed for simple integration with open source and closed source voice communications technologies.

"Sangoma is committed to provide agile solutions that bridge existing and emerging technologies. While we are justifiably proud of the Vega family of gateway appliances, it represents just one piece of our rapidly expanding portfolio that is designed to serve the evolving needs of service providers and businesses," concluded Dickey.

For more information about the Sangoma portfolio of IP telephony solutions, please see the Sangoma website here

It indicates there is a recognised leader in the industry for the specific area being compared. Such is the case with Xorcom and Digium.

The latter has finally come out with a resiliency solution for Asterisk and is trying to demonstrate that they now have a more cost-effective and robust resiliency solution than Xorcom.

You can view the full clarifications about Digium R-Series vs Xorcom TwinStar comparison article here.

VoIPon: Broadcasting from various countries around the world using voice over IP technology, this is VoIP Uncovered — A VoIPon Solutions UK podcast.  Representing, VoIPon, I’m Kathleen Reed.

Today, we’re happy to have the folks from Sangoma, a leading provider of hardware and software components that enable or enhance IP communication systems for both voice and data join us again today to bring us up to speed on the latest developments at their company.

Joining us today is Bill Wignall, their president and CEO and Jeff Dworkin, their director of marketing. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

So, I’m going to jump right in with the first question. In the last year, Sangoma has undergone a lot of changes; can you share VoIPon’s listeners what’s going on with the company and why the Sangoma channel and end users should be excited about these developments?

Bill Wignall: Sure Kathleen thanks. Well, 2011 is truly a year of reinvention for Sangoma. I came in to take over the reigns at Sangoma about one year ago, and since then, we’ve completely rebuilt the executive management team and established an entirely new strategic direction for the company. Even with the reputation of the highest quality products in the industry, the company’s evolution had slowed and we had experienced flat sales for the couple of years. The new leadership team has reignited the growth engine and that’s the big change internally at Sangoma.

But frankly, customers and partners don’t care so much about that. They care about new products, more engineering talent to help support them and their applications. They care about having Sangoma staff closer to them. That’s how we’re driving these renewed growth initiatives.

We’re focused on delivering more value to those customers and to our distribution partners around the world. We’ve begun to see some results in just the first three quarters together as an executive team our quarterly sales are about 30%.

We dramatically expanded our product road map; we’ve launched aggressive new marketing programs and hired key new experienced senior sales executives in regions closer to the customers. And we have begun expanding our addressable market beyond traditional telephony interface boards into new product categories to both organic initiatives and via selected acquisitions.

VoIPon: Okay. So, speaking of acquisitions, recently Sangoma acquired Vegastream effectively entering the appliance market, which by some had been long awaited and by others might be considered controversial. So, how’s the channel responding?

Bill Wignall: One of the fundamental objectives at Sangoma is to do exactly that: Diversify beyond the telecom interface boards market, a space in which we’ve been a dominant player for a number of years. Months ago, our executive team identified they are ready to deploy appliance market as one of those areas in to which we should to expand. So, you’ll see many new appliance space products from Sangoma over the next year. And that category is where gateways come in.

We actually plan to develop our gateway products ourselves. But once we got into the development cycle planning, we decided to needed these products now. Not in the year plus that would take us to build them.

So we decided to acquire Vegastream to expand our presence from our legacy market segments, which will remain critical for us. And Vegastream gives us a bunch of advantages: great products, an office in UK to better serve our European customers, and expanded distribution network with little overlap to existing partners.

Vegastream was stuck in neutral due to problems with manufacturing and supply chain management and Sangoma has a history of being really good at doing these things.  We get new customers in a variety of geographic regions including India and Russia and we got an excellent team of both engineering and sales.

So, you could imagine with those advantages, the response from the channel is overwhelmingly positive. We have increased the options available to deliver on their customer’s needs. This expands the addressable market for those partners. Now, when a customer requires an external appliance, as part of their solution, Sangoma can deliver. We simply want it to be able to offer both solutions. Internal cards that get inserted into servers and external appliances, it’s that simple.

Kathleen: Fantastic. So, recently you announced revised pricing on the A500 BRI card and a firmware update that directly integrates with DAHDI, so the customers with lower density systems can effectively save up to 50% on the price of systems of 4 ports or less. Have you seen a shift to lower density systems in the EMEA and what other trends have come to light for this market?

Bill Wignall: Sure Kathleen. Well, Jeff, why don’t you take this one?

Jeff Dworkin: Sure. Well, since as Bill mentioned above are corporate objective for the coming years, 2012 especially, one of our goals is to build our key business in international markets. So, this was done in direct response to sort of better serve the European and generally, the entire EMEA market.

So, we recently hired a UK sales channel manager and this is one of the first things he sort of brought to the table, that we weren’t really getting the most bang for our buck with our BRI technology. We made these changes, they’ve sort of been on roadmap but they get crashed and accelerated, so we could better deliver on this very particular segment now. It doesn’t mean we’ve really seen a big shift to lower density systems. Again, it was more of just a response to what our channel manager saw: is that we were missing out on any of this lower density solutions and opportunities because we didn’t have this direct integration with the DAHDI driver for Asterisk. And, we were creating extra expense by requiring people to have hardware-based echo cancellation on these lower density systems, which is really necessary.

So, again, we lower the price, we fixed up our driver, and now we are really ready to attack this particular segment. So, this is really why it’s important that regionally placed sales people. You know, Steve came in and he really got a sense of what the local market needed and help us turn out into a product and hopefully new opportunity very quickly.

VoIPon: Fantastic. So, in terms of the market, where does Sangoma see the telephony marketing in general heading next?

Bill Wignall: Hmm, that’s a tough question Kathleen. You know, Sangoma doesn’t really focus on what the next single big thing will be. Our strategy involves selecting multiple products categories that target many of the key trends in our industry. So you will see us launch products that make use of the cloud and social networking, as just a couple of examples.

But if Sangoma had to prognosticate onto the year ahead, we’d say that perhaps 2012 will not be year, where we see a single new revolutionary technology, like tablets for instance. But rather might be a year of integration or update. We feel this way due to the fact that several new technologies have really just emerged recently, and because of the economic uncertainty, especially in Europe. When much financial uncertainty exists, companies and network operators tend to focus more on adopting efficiency improvements rather than on revolutionary technology.

So, offerings like SIP or VoIP will get fully more integrated into the fabric of business communications. Every business from the SOHO to the international enterprise will only be talking about when we will move to these technologies not if.  

Newer offerings like the cloud or the tablet usage will move out of the innovation, pilot and early adopters phase and move into the mainstream of business regular operations. We fully expect Sangoma to benefit from those trends as well.

Kathleen: Ok, excellent. Well, I want to thank both of you for your time today and for bringing VoIPon’s listeners up to speed on the latest developments.

This has been a VoIPon, VoIP uncovered podcast. For more information, please visit www.voipon.co.uk.

Reduced Price and Direct Integration with DAHDI can Reduce Implementation Costs by Nearly 50%

TORONTO, ONTARIO–(Marketwire – Nov. 14, 2011) – Sangoma Technologies Corporation (TSX VENTURE:STC), a leading provider of hardware and software components that enable or enhance IP Communications Systems for both voice and data, today announced that they have reduced the price of their Sangoma A500 S/T BRI Interface Board. In addition, they have also released a new version of the board firmware that is now directly integrated with the Asterisk(R) DAHDI Software Driver. This direct integration allows developers of low density BRI system to use the software-based echo cancellation that is included in Asterisk so that they no longer have the additional expense of implementing a hardware-based echo cancellation solution for low density solutions.

“This update has been on our roadmap for a while,” said Frederic Dickey, director of product management for Sangoma. “In addition, our recent acquisition of the VegaStream product line has caused us to take a close look at our EMEA focused products. In that examination, we determined that we needed to reduce the price of the A500 by 20% in order to be truly competitive in this market. The 20% price reduction, plus the fact that developers can save up to an additional $300 by using software echo cancellation instead of hardware echo cancellation, means a savings of nearly 50% on systems of four or less BRI ports when implementing using Asterisk.”

About Sangoma Technologies Corporation

Sangoma is a leading provider of hardware and software components that enable or enhance IP Communications Systems for both telecom and datacom applications. Enterprises, SMBs and Carriers in over 150 countries rely on Sangoma’s technology as part of their mission critical infrastructures. Through its worldwide network of Distribution Partners, Sangoma delivers the industry’s best engineered, highest quality products, some of which carry the industry’s first lifetime warranty. The product line includes data and telecom boards for media and signal processing as well as gateway appliances and software.

Combining H264 real-time video compression for analog video cameras, video decoding for displaying on TV, and voice/video public announcement systems (PAS), Grandstream is pleased to announce the new GXV3500 IP Video Encoder Decoder PAS for surveillance, security monitoring and facility management applications.

In a single, compact device, the GXV3500 extends investment in existing analog video cameras by helping businesses to easily upgrade network applications to IP while delivering higher resolution digital imagery using less bandwidth and less hardware devices. This “3-in-1” device combines advanced single channel H264 real time video compression or decompression functions at up to D1 resolution and up to 30fps in a single box. It also offers two-way audio paging and video streaming using SIP/VoIP to receive and display live video anywhere in the world on mobile phones, TV, PC and video phones. The device can also be a voice and video PAS for a variety of facilities including office floors, lobbies, shopping malls, warehouses, and more.

Announcing the availabililty of the beroNet GSM Modules for PCI and PCIe cards and Gateways.

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► Up-sell a Managed and Monitored service through the beroNet cloud

The Benefits of beroNet

Cloud Managed and Monitored

Remotely Monitor, Update, upgrade, provision, back-up, recover, create projects and schedule automatic tasks straight from your browser

Driver Free Technology

The world’s first driver free VoIP Card and Gateway technology running on all operating systems without the need to install drivers.

5 Minute Installations

Fast & Easy. The berofix solution is recognized as a network card in your system, it’s simply Plug & Play.

Modular Technology

Very flexible. You start with the berofix main-board and then just plug-in BRI, PRI, Analog, BRI/FXS Hybrid & GSM modules as your project needs.

The T3Mux connects to a DS3 via a coaxial BNC connection from a Telco provider and grooms the signal to individual T1 circuits via 14 RJ-45 connectors with each connector carrying two circuits. This is directly compatible with the full line of Sangoma digital interface boards, including the A101, A102, A104 and A108.

“The T3Mux was created in direct response to customer requests, particularly for use in large data centers and Telco operations,” said Frederic Dickey, director of product management at Sangoma Technologies. “It allows a customer to order a DS3 interface from their provider, which is less expensive than ordering individual circuits when an implementation requires a significant number of T1s. It also makes the installation and maintenance easier and less costly as it simplifies cabling. Plus, the T3Mux is guaranteed to be interoperable with other Sangoma products that our customers are already using in their installations. This release demonstrates our commitment to be ‘Not Just a Board Company Anymore’ as Sangoma continues to sharpen the focus on product innovation to broaden our portfolio.”

While Sangoma now has the Vega Media Gateways from the acquisition announced two weeks ago, this is a significant release for Sangoma, because it is the first appliance-based product developed by the company. Sangoma plans about a dozen product releases, including a number of new appliances, over the next twelve months.

Sangoma Releases Version 4 of NetBorder SS7 Media Gateway (formerly known as SMG)

Sangoma SS7 Media Gateway Solutions continue to evolve with the release of Sangoma NetBorder SS7 Media Gateway (or NSG), formerly known as Sangoma Media Gateway (SMG). Improvements in this version include the addition of Telco grade SS7 protocol stacks with multiple ISUP variants, a single ISO-based installation process, and a web-based GUI for easier installation, configuration and management of the system.

Sangoma ISDN BRI Board Now Supports Dadhi Natively

The latest WANPIPE drivers (version 3.5), released on August 25, add the native support of Dadhi for our Sangoma A500 ISDN BRI line interface boards. Customers using our Sangoma A500 boards can now benefit from the native support of the BRI protocol in Asterisk, as well as leveraging software based echo cancellation when appropriate.

Commenting on the alliance, Michael Bibelman, Voiceserve’s CEO, said, “Combining Voiceserve’s cutting-edge VoIP software platform with Grandstream’s advanced IP equipment into one marketing promotion is a win-win for both companies.  The combined worldwide reach of both companies, together with each company’s well recognized products in this fast growing VoIP market should prove to be a dynamic marketing alliance.”

“We are pleased to  announce the interoperability between Grandstream’s IP voice & video product lines and Voiceserve’s VoipSwitch platform”, said  David Li, CEO of Grandstream Networks.  “This mutual certification ensures our common customers  will have  a plug-and-play and end-to-end solution with very competitive performance and economic attraction.”