In advance of ITEXPO (News - Alert), taking place this week in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay, TMCnet spoke with Jim Machi, vice president of product management for network solutions provider Dialogic (News - Alert). TMCnet spoke with Jim about some emerging technologies and how they are likely to affect both service providers and end users in the future.

Chief among those technologies is Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), a transformative concept that moves network functionality to software and leverages commercially available IT server and virtualization technology. The technology is already changing the service provider landscape, and Machi notes that this is for good reason.

“Since NFV is built more like a data center, the service providers that come from that space (like Google (News - Alert)) may have a bit of a head start,” said Machi. “That said, there is immense interest in NFV from the whole industry, including the traditional carriers, so I don’t see the players changing that much.”


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While the players may not change much in the near future, the functional processes filled by service providers are likely to change dramatically. IT departments and networks are struggling to handle growing telecom and datacom business today, and equipment is becoming a real problem, particularly as so many solutions require dedicated equipment or networks. NFV is expected to alleviate many of these problems, so it’s no surprise that interest in the concept is high, particularly as the technology will allow service providers to become more agile and flexible.

Machi also addressed the growing movement towards software and how it impacts traditional hardware vendors, noting that these vendors will simply have to adjust.

“Dialogic has been moving toward software-based processing for a long time, as we’ve been making software-based media servers for more than 10 years,” said Machi. “We’ve learned a lot in that 10 years, and we’re taking those lessons to our other products as we move them towards NFV,” he said.

Another area that is changing the way businesses communicate today is video, and the use of video has been given a huge boost by recent innovations, particularly the advent of the WebRTC (“Real Time Communications”) standard that allows cross-browser video communications without the need to download anything in advance. Video, combined with newer standards, will lead to a new era of workplace collaboration, according to Machi.

“Dialogic has always thought of video as a potential mainstream business technology,” Machi said. “As video cameras are built into laptops and computer terminals now, we’re going to see workplace collaboration take off since you can build a collaboration system relatively inexpensively now, using standard SIP, or now WebRTC, endpoints.”

For more information about ITEXPO, visit www.itexpo.com.