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Emerging. Incorporated in 1990, Commetrex is nearing completion of nine years of product development and has begun marketing.
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| Summary |
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Commetrex develops and markets enabling technologies designed to shorten the time to market and reduce the development cost of integrated-media telecommunications equipment. Known for its fax and other licensed technologies, Commetrex is now completing a multi-year development effort to offer the equipment developer middleware software products and a media-stream framework, plus a comprehensive line of PCI and CompactPCI DSP-resource and network-interface boards.
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| Target Customer |
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Telecommunications-Equipment OEMs such as Commetrex customers 3Com, 8x8, ARC Cores, AudioCodes, Brecis Communications, Catena Networks, ECI Telecom, Motorola, NMS Communications, Pika Technologies, Lucent, Siemens, Sprint Communications, UTStarcom.
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| Customer Motivation |
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Commetrex' products allow the equipment developer to meet the market’s need for media flexibility while responding to time-to-market pressures, scarce capital, and regulatory and standards uncertainty, yet not give up control of his product platform.
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| Product |
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Commetrex spent nine years developing the technologies on which the current and next-generation access networks are based, and has made them available to the equipment developer in a way that allows him to choose just the technologies and components that match his development model…and nothing more.
The keystone of Commetrex architecture is the decomposition of a multi-channel integrated-media telecommunications system into the modular value-adding components that create a high value to the OEM designing systems: call-stream-processing software (sometimes called “DSP algorithms”), a portable stream-processing software framework, telephony hardware, and telephony middleware.
Commetrex offers:
OTF(tm) Kernel telecommunications client-server telephony middleware. Commetrex offers an open vendor and resource-independent middleware product, Open Telecommunications Framework Kernel (OTF). OTF Kernel is standards-based (ECTF (http://www.ectf.org) S.100 conformant).
DSP-resource boards include Commetrex’ MSP Media Gateway product line which brings the industry an order-of-magnitude increase in density, while reducing price and power per port.
Digital signal processing (DSP) software for communications including OpenMedia(tm), based on the MSP Consortium (http://www.msp.org/) M.100 recommendation. This product is the industry’s only open-architecture streams environment.
Their exclusive products include: BladeWare™ Media Server Platform, TerminatingT38™, OTF Kernel™, OpenMedia™, Voice Transcoding Subsystem, OpenEndpoint™, Multi-Modal Terminating Fax™. |
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| Revenue Model |
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Commetrex licenses software and sells hardware to equipment developers. Starting Q1 04 it projects a 30:70 mix of hardware and software revenue. In addition it provides engineering services and consulting.
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| Sales Channels |
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Direct. Products involve a highly technical sale requiring knowledgeable sales people.
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| Proprietary Advantage |
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Commetrex has a deep understanding of telephony equipment design and the value-added component markets.
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| Recent Success Stories |
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Commetrex recently shipped its BladeWare product to the first customer and has 13 additional customers lined up for evaluation. IBM and others have marketed their blade processor units to the Telco industry - BladeWare provides the software to turn these boxes into stream processors at a much lower cost than using specialized DSP boards.
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| Strategic Partners |
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Texas Instruments - Commetrex is a member of Texas Instruments' Third Party Developer Network and a specialist in TI's flagship DSP product.
SoftRISC - is porting Commetrex software to RISC processors.
BayPackets - is the first customer of BladeWare. BayPackets will use BladeWare to extend its unified-messaging and personal communications applications to support fax.
Commetrex are also in development programs with IBM, Intel and HP. |
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| Key Competitors and Differentiators |
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The communications system developer has a range of options from which to choose. Commetrex believes that none of them can match its solution in terms of flexibility of fit with the OEM’s development strategy and model, in value, or scope of the solution.
As a result, a new competitive space has been revealed between low-level components, such as DSPs and DSP (digital signal processor) software, and the closed-architecture integrated platforms of incumbents, such as Brooktrout and NMS Communications. Commetrex competes at both of these levels, but also offers system-framework and media-streams framework software never before available to the OEM as a value-adding component.
BladeWare has only one direct competitor, Intel with their NetStructure product. But this product is a closed system.
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| Metrics |
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Full-time equivalent employees and contractors: 14
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| Investment Capital |
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Commetrex' primary funding to date has been from customers. It is currently seeking a 'B' round of from $3 to $5 million to expand sales and marketing efforts now that product development is complete.
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| Lead Investors |
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Family, friends, angels and corporate investors (Intelligent Systems Corp. 12%, Brooktrout Technology, Inc. 9%,)
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| Management Team |
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CEO: Michael Coffee, formerly VP, Marketing NMS Communications.
CTO: Cliff Schornak, former President Systems By Design, Senior Consultant BellSouth.
Director, Embedded Systems: Ben Feldgajer, former CEO ADI, Inc. programmable switches.
Director, Signal Processing Tech.: Bruce Adams, former CEO, Systems+Software, Inc, Principal Engineer Modem Design, Hayes Micro.
Director, Marketing Communications: Elizabeth Rubbo, formerly Marketing Communications Specialist at Computer Communications Specialist.
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| Advisors |
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Legal: Kilpatrick Stockton
Accounting: Greenway and Associates
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| ©2002 Innovations Publishing LLC |
