Fred Wydler, Director of Products for Spirit, recently sat down with me to discuss Google, Microsoft (News - Alert), and Apple’s entrances into the telecom market, as well as Spirit’s upcoming presentation at ITEXPO.

 

Since 1996, SPIRIT has delivered embedded voice, audio, video, and communication software products and consulting services to the world’s leading telecommunication OEMs, semiconductor suppliers and software vendors. Read more about the company here.

 

SPIRIT is always on the edge of innovation. Today, we believe the plain old cell phone is going to die. A new, smart, converged communication device, with access to lots of value added services, is going to take its place. The mix of text messaging options, phone calls, music playback, VoIP calling with video and synthetic video capabilities — all implemented in a small, powerful mobile device with a virtual TV-sized screen, so it can be a video phone, audio system and TV. That is our vision on the future of communications. We provide the technological platform for this development with SPIRIT innovative Voice & Video over IP solutions, bringing high quality and reliable performance to smartphones, online gaming, STBs, media servers, home gateways, conferencing appliances, and more.

 

Multimedia communication (audio, VoIP, Video over IP) is the main mobile terminal device market today, growing faster than any other mobile segment, including mobile TV. SPIRIT is addressing this fast-growing market by offering Audio/Voice/Video Engines for the Mobile OEMs and Converged device OEMs. During the last two years, SPIRIT has established itself as a leader in embedded high quality VoIP solutions. Just three years ago, VoIP was a novelty with Skype, and already, it has become a must for mobile OEMs. We are happy and proud that we can help mobile and fixed-line OEMs provide subscribers with richer communications and lower costs.

 

SPIRIT and other companies like ours drive IP communications adoption, by encapsulating VoIP, making it easy and reliable. We make the dream of everywhere mobility and multi-way video connectivity a reality, and are helping set global standards.

 

SIP simplifies the connections. SPIRIT’s VoIP solution is optimized to work with both SIP and H.323, as well as with other proprietary signaling protocols, and we partner with other recognized SIP providers, like Radvision. Together with Radvision, we have conducted a number of successful implementations of our joint solution for multiparty and multicast sessions, including Internet calling, multimedia conferencing, and more.

 

Many of our customers are mobile devices makers, and what they desperately need is a complete, highly optimized, pre-integrated solution for multimedia communication over IP. It must have low BOM cost, low MIPS processor for low power consumption, and low end user device cost . They look for a ready-to-deploy, ready-to-go product that will combine quality voice, video, and audio in one framework. IMS is coming to the market, multi-way conferencing is in demand, as is greater efficiency and quality of conferencing.

 

We offered our customers a solution that perfectly matches their demands: TeamSpirit Voice & Video Engine and SPIRIT audio engine. The product is easy to integrate, saves processor resources, power and costs, and streamlines time to market. At the same time, it guarantees all required functionality to secure high quality voice, video, and audio over WiFi (News - Alert) networks. The greatest benefit for our customers is that SPIRIT offers not only a voice solution, but has already integrated voice and video. No one in the industry can boast such results.

 

SPIRIT has several major advantages that compel our customers to choose our solutions versus our competitors’. The first is Quality — it’s about how a user sees and hears; the second is Differentiation — how our customers can increase their revenues using our product to differentiate their handset designs from their competition; and the third is low OEM BOM Costs, low MIPS processor, and ease of integration.

 

SPIRIT brings 15 years of expertise in creating and delivering embedded audio, voice, and video solutions to the global OEM telecom market. We conduct R&D in-house, and if some development issues are out of SPIRIT’s professional coverage, we find the strongest complementary partners in the market to collaborate with.

 

VoIP communication is becoming increasingly mobile, which is trend that will continue into the foreseeable future. Video over IP technologies smoothly adhere to voice, and we see the future of the market in compact powerful mobile phones with big screens and STBs with big screens, as a perfect platform for video-calling — just take a look at recent Intel IP-STB reference design, incidentally, running SPIRIT Voice/Video Engine. We also see a great potential in MMOGs, as they are already adding VoIP functionality into the games, and here SPIRIT offers its quality voice conferencing platform for MMOG with unprecedented efficiency (1200 concurrent connection per single PC server).

What do you think of Google (News - Alert) and Apple entering the telecom market?

That is good news for us, as it inevitably brings smartphones to the mass market, and makes user interfaces easy and intuitive. Both companies also immediately become our potential mobile OEM customers. They will definitely need best-in-class solutions to penetrate markets that are new to them, win market share, and stay competitive. We, at SPIRIT, are confident we can win their loyalty as the best-in-class voice and video engine provider. We also believe there are other heavyweight “newcomers” in the mobile industry that might greatly influence or even change the market. Take a look at another SPIRIT customer — HTC, the world’s biggest smart-phone vendor on Windows Mobile platform. SPIRIT customers today deliver over 50% of all global smartphone shipments, and SPIRIT software products are inside their designs.

 

Microsoft has made VoIP and enterprise collaboration a strategic corporate focus, doing a great job. It is good to see major activities in communication and collaboration by Apple, Google, Cisco, Adobe, and Oracle (News - Alert) as well. Everyone is in the game now, which is definitely good for SPIRIT as the supplier of the voice, audio, video core technology to them. By the way, all of them — Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Adobe and Oracle — are current SPIRIT customers.

How will wireless technologies change our market?

The worldwide mobility phenomenon puts new quality demands on VoIP due to the nature of wireless networks. Solutions that were good for lossless or wired network are not good enough for WiFi. The SPIRIT Engine, being tested by operators in the WiFi environment, show more than a 20% advantage in quality compared to anybody else, having been architected and designed specifically for WiFi. The wireless space is growing rapidly, replacing traditional wired communication. Customer adoption is held back by reliability issues, but as soon as wireless technologies become as reliable as wired, no one will be able to prevent their triumph. We believe in the future of WiFi and WiMAX, technology, which is already starting to rival 3G & 4G. However, SPIRIT products support both competing standards.

What sorts of things will we be hearing about during your presentation at ITEXPO?

We will be focusing on the most challenging issues encountered in mobile VoIP applications and ways to overcome them. We will outline our vision of the SPIRIT mobile interactive IP multimedia platform as a basis for development and deployment of revenue-bringing value added services. And of course we will share our vision on the market future with the audience.

 
Why is your presentation a “Can’t Miss?”

What do you want the industry to know about your company?

SPIRIT voice, audio, video is #1 today in the global Mobile smartphone OEM segment. SPIRIT is the only vendor in the world who offers both PC and mobile voice and video engines with outstanding quality. SPIRIT is the global de-facto VoIP standard for 2008, taking into account our contracts with the global leaders who have already signed. Old standards are not going to survive for too long.

 

Multi-way and visual communication is natural for humans. The old habit to talk on phone “one-to-one” is passé. The whole communication culture is changing now — look at MySpace and the whole Web2.0 — it’s “many-to-many” communication. So, in a few years, we will see quite a different way for people to visually communicate — multipoint ad-hoc voice/video conferencing using compact, but powerful, wireless mobile devices that can project TV-size HD video images on any surface (instead of looking at small screens), that can project virtual keyboards on any surface (instead of clicking micro buttons), and recognize human speech.