Mike Donoghue, VP Sales, Americas, Aculab (News - Alert) opened this morning’s keynote session with a presentation entitled "Enabling Technology Choices for Applications Developers."

Donoghue began by recounting how he’s constantly in contact with customers and he often speaks with them about the choices they have. With consolidation, and standards evolution, it’s becoming a challenge for developers to embrace the many decisions they need to make. Open versus proprietary decisions; DSP versus HMP… and so on.

Among the considerations facing developers today Donoghue laid out a list:

In the end, he said, "The choices that have to be made need to be the ones that satisfy the best fit for your application."

Since 96, maybe 1 billion dollars have been spent on developing platforms.

Donoghue maintains that the VoIP industry has never really agreed on a single software standard, causing problems for developers, forcing them to develop to proprietary APIs, and forcing vendors to create expensive abstraction layers.

Hardware standards, however, have helped propel the industry forward.)

Today, with the increasing power of the host CPU, less expensive bandwidth, and more efficient codecs, application developers have more choices than ever before.

He delved a bit deeper into several topics, including host media processing or HMP, Open Source, and DSP cards. He began by how HMP it is becoming an increasingly popular choice for VoIP enabling technology.

According to Donoghue, HMP is cheaper, costing 10’s instead of 100’s of dollars per channel. It’s more scalable. Reliability is increased as there is no single point of failure Developers are enamored with open standards-based technology, and with Moore’s Law developers are provides a path to growth.

Regarding open source, Donoghue laid out the pros and cons. In favor of open source, we can point to the lack of licensing costs and the improvements that come from a diverse community of developers constantly feeding back information. And, on the negative side, Donoghue cited a lack of timely support, and important for businesses who wish to differentiate themselves, a lack of unique defensible features.

"The best bet," he said, "is often a blend of open source and proprietary."

DSP cards still have a role. They are good at bridging legacy and next generation networks, and they are also an excellent choice for applications such as echo cancellation, fax, and video.

Future applications will demand more: More high availability; More service continuity; More content; More use of wideband codecs; More security… Media processing sits at the heart of this future roadmap.

Donoghue closed with this thought, "You can have the best of both worlds — DSP and HMP-based technology; Standards based and proprietary APIs.

"Developers have more choices than ever before. Remember, it’s all about finding the best fit for your applications and target customer base."