Fourth Quarter 2009

     If you read our Commetrex Outlook newsletter, you know that BladeWare now supports the entire Sangoma product line of PCI and PCI Express PSTN-interface boards. Suddenly, Commetrex has the industry’s broadest line of products for the enterprise-fax OEM. “But how can that be?” you say. “The incumbents have spent decades developing their boards and HMP fax platforms.” Well, yes, but they were unable to take advantage of the industry’s evolution, which is proceeding along the same path blazed by the PC industry.

     Imagine, for a moment, how inefficient it would be if Dell, Toshiba, and HP had to develop hard drives and micro-processors in order to come out with a new laptop. That would be ridiculous given today’s margins, time-to-market, and ROI pressures. But when I was a young engineer, that’s exactly what IBM had to do, and it’s what the incumbent fax players had to do back in the ‘90s. But it’s not what Commetrex has to do today--perhaps yesterday, but not today.

     When we began developing our fax technologies back in the mid-‘90s, there were no open-architecture DSP boards to run our modems. And forget about HMP, the MIPS just weren’t there. As a cash-strapped start-up we needed to get to market fast. What to do? The answer we came up with was to prevail upon our good friends at NMS (where I had been VP, Marketing and Sales) to give us access to their embedded code (Remember the VBX boards? Probably not.) so we could turn their voice boards into voice-fax boards by adding our newly developed fax-modem software. This produced our first product, MultiFax for VBX, which, in 1993, was the industry’s first third-party software add-in product. NMS later licensed the software, which is where NaturalFax came from. We went on from there to become a major licensor of fax technologies to carrier, test-equipment, and semi-conductor OEMs, while we were busy developing BladeWare, our HMP telephony platform.

     But we never forgot the lesson of how powerful a market force technical specialization could be. So, in early 2009, following some major design wins for BladeWare in the enterprise-fax OEM market, it became obvious that our OEM customers wanted more. They were enjoying the benefits of BladeWare’s high function and performance at an unbeatable price, and wanted the same in applications where PSTN connectivity was required. BladeWare had been designed to readily support hardware as both PSTN interfaces and media-processing resources, so we knew if we could find a product line that met our requirements it would be simple to add it to BladeWare.

     So, what were those requirements?

• Analog boards supporting both station and office trunks up to 24 ports, preferably configurable.
• E1/T1/J1 digital boards supporting at least four spans, robbed-bit, and ISDN signaling.
• ISDN BRI supporting at least four lines yielding 8 ports.
• PCI and PCI Express in a 2U form factor.
• Windows and Linux support.
• Costs low enough to price our products well below the incumbents and still meet target margins. (This was aided in some cases by high incumbent pricing and others by the cost disadvantages of non-HMP solutions.)

     Then, Sangoma entered the picture. They meet these requirements and then some. And today we’ve added a Sangoma resource service manager (RSM) to work alongside our SIP RSM, giving the OEM, in addition to the above,

• TerminatingT38 V3 IP fax with V.34 Fax Modem support,
• Terminating G.711 pass-through fax with V.34,
• Analog station and office trunks to 24 ports requiring only one expansion slot,
• Single-, dual-, quad-, and octal digital boards,
• BRI to 24 line/48 ports, and
• Unbeatable pricing.

     So why is this happening now? One answer is HMP. Because Sangoma developed its hardware product line to meet the need for PSTN interfaces created by HMP IP-PBXs, such as Asterisk, there was no need for DSPs or media processing except for, possibly, echo cancellers. This had the effect of partitioning Sangoma’s product-development investment onto PCM-interface boards, while Commetrex was investing in telephony middleware and media-processing (BladeWare). This tightening of investment focus at the two companies had the effect of producing best-in-class products for both companies. And they are even more powerful when combined.

     The times, they are a-changin’.