The economic climate certainly posed its challenges for many businesses in 2009. Yet some companies in the communications technology sector fared better than others.

 

Officials from Aculab, the U.K.-based provider of enabling technology for the communications market, said the company was in a better position because its status as a debt-free firm helped the business. Despite the trying times, the VoIP developer found success with new products and services, including offering video services on its Prosody X and Prosody S platforms and strengthening support of IP fax.

 

And building off these initiatives, Aculab (News - Alert) is predicting a healthy future.

 

“Aculab is quite optimistic that it will continue to experience growth in 2010, especially as more and more service providers, enterprises and developers seek the most efficient means to deliver new capabilities while preserving their network infrastructures,” Chris Gravett, sales and marketing director, Aculab, told TMCnet in an interview, printed in full below. “Our proven ability to extend the lifecycles of our customer’s infrastructure investment will resonate just as much in a growth economy as it does during a recession.”  

 

Part of that growth includes plans to introduce a new technology in the New Year, a Dual Redundant SIP Service. The technology will be especially useful for service providers as well as in emergency services communications deployments, Gravett said.

 

Our exchange follows.

 

Chris Gravett: All things considered, Aculab performed well. Our status as a private, debt-free company put us in a better position to operate the business and serve customers, particularly since we have no external investors to answer to and no loans or borrowing to be serviced.

 

Aculab achieved many of its objectives in 2009, which centered around innovation and new product delivery. Our emphasis on continuing to invest in new products and services culminated in the launch of several new features and capabilities, such as delivering video capabilities on both the Prosody X and Prosody S platforms, and rolling out a comprehensive new services plan to our customers.

 

Our gateway portfolio – including the GroomerII and ApplianX families – has also been enhanced. ApplianX, in particular, continues to build on to its outstanding reputation for ease of use, reliability and cost effectiveness. We are proud that through the deepest global recession in generations we have had the financial strength and foresight to continue to invest in R&D to deliver innovative technologies to our customers.

 

CG: Aculab has continued to develop its range of board- and software-based enabling technologies in addition to its ApplianX and GroomerII gateway product lines. There have been several significant milestones involving all of our products at one time or another this year.

 

From an ApplianX gateway perspective, an important step forward was the release of our DPNSS-to-Q.SIG gateway, which is designed to satisfy the urgent requirements of customers in the UK and other markets. The agility Aculab displayed in quickly bringing this gateway to market illustrates the resourcefulness and commitment of our entire staff.

 

Where GroomerII is concerned, there have been several developments throughout the year. Among these include an enhancement in its SS7-to-SIP call handling capabilities, which cement its position as the signalling and media gateway of choice for next generation E911 PSAP applications. We also added a 2U variant to the range.

 

We’ve also fortified our support of IP fax. Unlike the Martinique parrot, fax is not extinct by any means, and, indeed, seems to have undergone a fresh re-birth with the increasing popularity of T.38. Aculab’s enabling technology is used to good effect by many hosted service providers offering fax broadcast solutions. Prosody X – Aculab’s scalable, distributable, high density, DSP-based media processing board – inarguably offers industry-leading fax handling capabilities. And in addition to being able to use Prosody X for traditional fax server applications, users are now able to integrate its high density fax capabilities with HylaFAX, the open source fax client-server option.

 

Another key area is the ongoing evolution of Aculab’s portfolio of wideband – or HD Voice – codecs. These techniques are becoming more commonplace, and can be often found in conferencing servers, for example. Aculab now supports a broad range of vocoders, including the wideband codecs iSAC, G.722, G.722.1, G.722.2 (a.k.a. AMR-WB) and Speex.

 

We also achieved a major milestone in host media processing when we released version 3.0 of our Prosody S product. This release now offers both Linux OS and virtual machine support, giving developers the benefit of the distributed architecture and remote API capabilities already available to Prosody X users. Now, a single Prosody S system can be distributed across several servers, adding resilience and load balancing capabilities, and enabling large systems to be built.

 

In addition we also introduced a V.150.1 modem over IP gateway capability, which is ideal for military, public service and first responder applications. MoIP plays a critical role in secure environments, where gateways between IP- and TDM-based secure telephones are needed. In addition, with the increased interest in machine-to-machine and telemetry over IP applications, we expect that V.150.1 will fit in equally well into those environments.

 

Conferencing is one technology that has experienced growth this past year, caused in large part by the economic downturn. As many businesses have been forced to cut travel budgets, they nonetheless must still find effective vehicles to communicate and collaborate with customers, team members and suppliers. Conferencing solutions – both hosted and premise-based – are becoming increasingly popular as effective Web-based conferencing and collaboration solutions that improve productivity, and substantially reduce the time and costs associated with business travel.

 

From a technology standpoint, we see that HD Voice codecs will have the opportunity to greatly enhance conferencing solutions. Aculab continues to support our developer partners by adding several HD Voice codecs that enable better quality audio conferencing. While HD Voice as a technology can enhance many areas of communications, it is particularly germane for the many conferencing providers that must now compete on the quality of audio.

 

We are fortunate that Aculab offers a robust set of technologies to assist conferencing solutions developers and providers. Prosody S version 3.0 software and the Prosody X board products provide the high density, scalable solutions that these providers rely upon to deliver compelling and cost-effective services to their clients.

 

 

CG: While some deployment decisions were delayed or even cancelled due to capital restraint, we’ve come through the recession remarkably well. It’s true that prices have come under pressure, and we’ve had to work more closely with customers to close some deals. But there are a number of positives that have come out of this recession. Perhaps the most interesting idea is that of ‘extensibility.’ While many of our customers do not have – or are not willing to invest in – capital for ‘rip and replace’ strategies, they nonetheless must integrate new services and capabilities into their offerings if they are to remain competitive. Many of these customers have come to the conclusion – rightfully so – that Aculab’s enabling technologies offer the most prudent path for integrating these advanced capabilities into existing infrastructure. Aculab’s ability to extend the lifecycle of legacy infrastructure has earned us high marks from customers around the world. Even as the economy continues to improve, we see an even greater emphasis being placed on extensibility as a cost-effective alternative to the expensive and disruptive ‘rip and replace’ methodologies that many other vendors have touted.

 

 

 

Even with the economy in growth mode, we fully expect that Aculab’s concept of ‘extensibility’ will continue to resonate with many customers, particularly service providers, who must keep an eye on both CAPEX and OPEX (News - Alert) while striving to compete in a struggling economy.

 

In terms of technology, we’re in the midst of the decade of ‘anything’ over IP. It seems that now it’s the turn of modem and telemetry over IP. Today’s machines benefit from the ability to connect worldwide, so machine-to-machine over IP will be a further growth opportunity for data communication, especially in vertical markets like healthcare, transportation, security, and financial services.

 

For Aculab, the New Year promises to be quite exciting, particularly since we expect to debut a very new technology, a Dual Redundant SIP Service. We see this ground-breaking capability as having a very profound and tangible effect on the way features and services are utilized in an IP environment. The DRSS will be especially meaningful in service provider environments, and in emergency services and other critical communications deployments. 

 

CG: We fully expect the economy to pick up, particularly in North America. In addition, we are hopeful that spending across Europe, Asia and in emerging markets will grow as greater emphasis is placed on improving the communications infrastructure and delivering new services.

 

Aculab is quite optimistic that it will continue to experience growth in 2010, especially as more and more service providers, enterprises and developers seek the most efficient means to deliver new capabilities while preserving their network infrastructures. Our proven ability to extend the lifecycles of our customer’s infrastructure investment will resonate just as much in a growth economy as it does during a recession.