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January 25, 2007

Dialogic's Jim Machi Discusses the Evolving Network and Open Systems during ITEXPO

By Richard Grigonis, Executive Editor, IP Communications Group

Jim Machi, VP of marketing at Dialogic (News - Alert), talked about the evolving public network and about how open systems solve problems and help companies develop communications products faster during his Jan. 24 keynote at INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO EAST 2007, which runs through tomorrow at the Broward County Convention Center in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

Machi, who is responsible for developing marketing strategy and driving the product planning and realization for all of Dialogic’s products, began his keynote by defining open systems.

“A long time ago, before I came to Dialogic, I was in the Unix industry,” Machi said. “We were real die-hard standard-based people because every aspect of Unix was a standard and there were all sorts of open interfaces. We used to say that Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows wasn’t standards-based, but when I came to Dialogic I saw that I was wrong because there can be such a thing as a de facto standard, which means that something like Windows is so popular and so many developers are writing to it, that it’s essentially an open standard.”

“So there are different kinds of standards, and people would build platforms based on those standards,” Machi said. “Most PBXs today would still be considered proprietary even after all of these years – even the applications for each brand tend to be from the same vendor.”

The Public Network and how it’s Evolving

“The important thing, the thing that drives everything, are the clients,” Machi said. “We want to use different kinds of clients. We as consumers are willing to pay money to use them. There are things ranging from cell phones to IPTV (News - Alert). At the Consumer Electronics Show a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that there were tons of announcements regarding various types of client devices, so as phones become more like computers, and computers become small – ultra mobile PCs – and things in between will appear to have more capabilities and intelligence. There will be a lot of action in this space. The fact that we want to use clients and are willing to use them will place many stresses on the network, so we have different kinds of access methods ranging from the old wireline PSTN to wireless networks, to the newer WiMAX 802.16 wireless technology. Newer things such as WiMAX will impact what happens in the networks, either by solving problems or creating more of them - since you’re creating more networks, things have to interoperate with each other. That’s good for people like us at Dialogic, since we provide gateways between networks, and things like that. But the as more networks are allowed and the more complex things get, and there are also more problems to solve, unlike the old days in telecom.”

“So we have this multiplicity of networks coming together over time,” Machi continued. “Fixed-Mobile Convergence (News - Alert) [FMC] is the sort of panacea that will unite wireless and wireline communications functionality, many of these products will be realized as part of the IMS [IP Multimedia Subsystem] architecture for the world’s networks. IMS is beginning to be deployed today, and every carrier and everybody else is on a migration path to IMS. Everyone who’s into IMS and FMC will tell you that it will ‘happen’ next year and yes, it might all be deployed next year, but I’ve been in this business a long time, and I don’t think it will all come to pass next year. Somebody may deploy some of it, but IMS and FMC must encompass devices that must interoperate with each other, and that takes time.”

“The more networks there are the more gateways must be deployed to connect them, since they have to interoperate with each other,” he said. “How do you do that? With each network there’s always some kind of multimedia server, or just something that plays announcements over the network. How do you insert something like that into each network? As networks multiply in number, the more of these systems need to be deployed. This creates problems in terms of: how do you do that economically? How do you do it so that everything successfully ‘talks’ to each other? You have to back to establishing standards to solve the problem.”

“In terms of applications, back when I was a kid, perhaps the coolest application was a touch tone phone. That was one of the first sort of advanced applications for the PSTN, and it took a long time for everybody to get it. As we move to the present day, more applications appear and the must be deployed faster than ever before, because the clients are demanding that we need more different types of applications. There are more service providers today, and thus there’s more competition and the accompanying need to support more services such as video and triple play. More and more applications are coming, and so the service providers must be more innovative over time. How do you innovate over time? Applications demand deployment, or else the service provider or carrier will lose customers. How do you do that? Working with standards-based things helps.”

“When we design systems,” Machi added, “we don’t know what the killer application is going to be. We’re not smart enough to know what’s going to happen in a couple of years, and yet we’re designing products for the future today, and we don’t know how people will use them in the future. But, again, following standards helps.”

“I remember in 2002 I got a phone call from our Dialogic fellow who ran our sales in China,” he said. “He was talking to me about something called caller ringback tones. He started telling me, ‘Jim, over here, when people dial somebody up on the phone, they want to hear music playing instead of a ringing sound.’ I was astonished and confused that anybody would want to hear music playing over the phone instead of just hearing that standard ringing sound indicating that the callee’s phone was ringing. ‘We could make a lot of money off of this,’ the guy said. ‘Can we do it?’ And I said, well, it’s kind of like playing a voice prompt or an announcement over the network, so I went to our engineers and I asked them if they could build such a system. They said, ‘Yeah, we can do it, but it will take a lot of telephony boards.’ Well, I was ecstatic, since we sell boards, and therefore we could make a lot of money.”

“Within a couple of months we had developed something for one of our boards that enabled this caller ringback tone thing,” Machi said. “Our competition in the open systems board world also developed similar technology. If you think about our experience with China and caller ringback tones, there are now something like 100 million ports deployed. At this point, the majority of those systems capable of delivering that service are deployed on open systems platforms, either from us or from our competitors. That’s really a success story about how a company such as Dialogic can engineer something really quickly, and indeed the whole open industry was able to do it because of the standards upon which telephony boards are based.”

“When we designed the telephony boards, we had no idea people were going to do things with them like caller ringback tones,” Machi said. “They were really designed for handling just regular voice calls.”

“The future is here already - it’s ‘more normal’ now to have PBX connected to your company’s LAN,” he said. “VoIP is coming to the contact center. There’s been a lot of action in terms of moving IP Communications into the enterprise. IP wireless is starting to appear. You can have wired or wireless VoIP phones today too. Bandwidth problems relating to wireless VoIP phones are being resolved. We now have multi-modal clients such as the Blackberrys that can do more than one form of communication. All of these things are in the corporate network today, and they’re all driven forth because we as users get some kind of benefit from them. My boss thinks I get a benefit from having a Blackberry -- whether I want one or not isn’t important to him. He thinks a Blackberry is good for me, so I get one. Corporations are deploying these things as a matter of course, dragging their employees into the future.”

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Richard Grigonis is an internationally-known technology editor and writer. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert), he was the Editor-in-Chief of VON Magazine from its founding in 2003 to August 2006. He also served as the Chief Technical Editor of CMP Media’s Computer Telephony magazine (later called Communications Convergence) from its first year of operation in 1994 until 2003. In addition, he has written five books on computers and telecom (including the Computer Telephony Encyclopedia and Dictionary of IP Communications). To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

(source: http://ipcommunications.tmcnet.com/hot-topics/open-source/articles/4725-dialogics-jim-machi-discusses-evolving-network-open-systems.htm)

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