Dialogic (News - Alert) President and CEO Bill Crank recently laid out the company’s real-time communications strategy – announcing its acquisition of APEX Communications Inc. and revealing its overall vision and product roadmap.

APEX Communications is a media processing company that has been a Dialogic partner for many years. The acquisition of APEX, a private company that for 25 years has delivered applications and other solutions to service providers, will jumpstart the application practice Dialogic just launched, Crank explained. Dialogic declined to provide financial details of the APEX acquisition.

The Dialogic application practice will offer applications, build applications for specific customers, and deliver managed services for its communications service provider customers, said Crank. In the process, he said, it will enable Dialogic to leverage its intellectual property and bring more value to the industry.

“This is a natural extension to our business,” said Crank.

Applications are just a piece of what Dialogic offers on the real-time communications front. Dialogic also provides underlying infrastructure including gateways, session border controllers, and switches. It sells application-related solutions such as its PowerMedia XMS and PowerMedia MRB (News - Alert) (media resource broker), its new load balancer for real-time communications, and its managed cloud offerings. Dialogic, which has offered a software-based media server for 10 years, is the No. 1 provider of software-based media servers, and its goal is to be the No. 1 real-time media load balancer on the planet, Crank said.

In the second quarter of this year Dialogic expects to introduce new signaling interworking and media gateway control functions in its SBC and switch solutions. In 2017 the company will launch cloud offerings.

Thirty three-year-old Dialogic is now privately owned by Novacap but was part of Intel (News - Alert) from 1999 to 2006. The company has been a pioneer in the WebRTC space. As discussed in the November 2014 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY, Dialogic has said it sees WebRTC as a core catalyst for bringing real-time communications to the enormous web development community. WebRTC, the company said at the time, is also helping traditional telephony developers move into the larger web development world. But although the telcos have been the traditional customers for Dialogic, Crank in his recent comments mentioned the company is also very comfortable working with over-the-top entities.