I had lunch with an investment-banker friend a few months ago. He asked me about my views on the current market conditions and drivers for Commetrex’ value-adding products. I explained that the market was extremely weak, and that my hope was that we were having lunch during the market’s bottom. But that, in my opinion, the current conditions of lowered investment in product development, standards and regulatory uncertainty, and rapid changes in technology should combine to increase demand for value-adding products. He asked why that hadn’t increased the sales of the industry’s incumbents. I explained that even the strongest drivers could not sell products for projects that did not exist. But there is another factor that will become extremely important as the market turns around and new development projects are funded.

      The value-adding component market began when developers of enterprise systems were offered a way to avoid the investment in the underlying platform of a digital-media telephony system, procuring it instead from a company such as Brooktrout or NMS Communications. Product development was extremely efficient since only the application had to be developed. This increased efficiency created a $10-billion industry. But there was a downside: the developer had to cede control of his product platform to his vendor. If a new project required an unsupported media technology, for example, there were usually no options, including developing it in house since the platform’s closed architecture did not allow it. Lack of control of the platform is the primary reason the carrier-equipment industry has been reluctant to embrace the model.

     If a platform vendor’s system framework, streams framework, and media technologies were perfect for an application, but the platform vendor’s proprietary hardware did not support the system requirements, the OEM was out of luck. A $10-15-million investment and a two-year time-to-market delay was required to develop these system elements. One thing the industry did supply the developer of digital-media systems was the media technologies. Texas Instruments’ Third-Party Developer’s Network was there to offer licensed media technologies for any member to TI’s TMS320 family of DSPs.

     But there were no licensed system-framework software products.

     And there were no licensed vendor-independent media-processing frameworks.

     OK, you already know where I’m heading: Commetrex has these products: Open Telecommunications Framework? Kernel and OpenMedia. OTF Kernel is a resource- and vendor-independent digital-media client-server system framework. And OpenMedia is a streams framework that allows the OEM to integrate first- and third-party media technologies on the same system. And it works with and without OTF Kernel. So the OEM can pick and choose which major system components to make and which to buy. It’s no longer an all-or-nothing deal.

     We at Commetrex believe that this decomposition of the high-capacity integrated-media telephony system heralds a new value-adding architecture for the industry. This new architecture promises to bring the efficiencies formerly only enjoyed by the computer industry to telecom.

     For example, Urmet Sistemi (Rome, Italy), a media-server manufacturer, was looking to improve margins and increase system density of its next-generation product by developing a proprietary media blade. Urmet was able to build the business case for the project by licensing Commetrex’ OTF Kernel. Structurally, this is similar to a PC OEM licensing Windows.

     Another OEM needed to produce an IP endpoint on a proprietary form factor. The system was small enough to not require a system framework. But at 64 channels and multiple media (voice, fax, and data), a high-function media-streams framework was required. The answer was OpenMedia.

     These products and the architectural decomposition behind them represent just the next step in the industry’s march to improved efficiency. It all began in 1984 with Dialogic’s voice board, which put anyone with a PC-AT in the telecom-system business. The next step was NMS’s MVIP initiative, which made systems more extensible and media-rich. CompactPCI, with the objective of creating an open hardware ecosystem, was an important step. It’s now being followed by Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA), which updates the standard to meet today’s density and power requirements.

     Now comes Commetrex with a standards-based (ECTF S.100 and MSP Consortium) decomposition that lets the OEM take advantage of ATCA without having to cede control of his strategic product platform or invest the millions of dollars or years required to develop the necessary system-framework software to do so.

     I hope you have the time to check out this new architecture we call Open Telecommunications framework (http://www.commetrex.com/OTF_Portal.html), and its two category-defining products, OTF Kernel (http://www.commetrex.com/products/CTMiddleware/OTF/OTFKernel.html) and OpenMedia (http://www.commetrex.com/products/mspe/openmedia/OpenMediaSDK.html). These two products give you a foundation for PSTN, IP, or dual-network systems. In fact, these products are the foundation of Commetrex’ host-signal processing system, BladeWare (http://www.commetrex.com/products/CTMiddleware/BladeWarePB.html).

     In closing, I wish you the very best of everything in the coming year.