Telecom Lead India: Dialogic is committed to offering
bandwidth optimization solutions in the Asian region and around the world with
its range of Dialogic I-Gate Session Bandwidth Optimizers, which can
cost-effectively optimize network traffic and reduce bandwidth requirements.
Kevin Cook, the newly appointed CEO of Dialogic, talks about opportunities in
India. Excerpts of an online interview:
What are the company’s investment and expansion plans –
facilities, people and geographical reach – for Indian and Global markets?
Global markets, including the Indian market, are vital to
us. We consider investing in these markets as an important part of the
company’s growth strategy. In India specifically, we currently have development
and support offices in Noida and Pune, and sales in Delhi and Mumbai. We’ve
grown the Noida office by 20 people in the last year. It’s not only important
to us to have developers in India that help our product development overall,
they also have to understand the local Indian market as well.
What are the new products/offerings in the
pipeline?
Dialogic’s focus is in making sure that the subscriber
mobile experience is a good one through service creation, service delivery, and
service optimization. As such, we are investing in bandwidth optimization
products which help expand bandwidth capacity, and products that enable
innovative mobile value added services and therefore facilitate new services.
We also have great edge network products that connect networks together and
deliver services along these networks, which have traditionally been gateways.
However, as the transport mechanism changes to IP, these edge products
transition to session border controllers. So we have been investing in and will
continue to invest in session border controllers. In fact, if you go to our
website you will see that an independent 3rd party testing organization called
Miercom gave us very high marks for our SBC.
In the last quarter Dialogic revenue declined 31 percent,
what will be your strategy to curb these issues?
Part of the issue in Q2 was a global issue in general
that affected our industry, as highlighted by Infonetic’s recent Service
Provider Infrastructure report. However, our legacy TDM products are declining
and that is expected. Therefore, investing in next generation products that
enable a better Mobile Experience as indicated above is our strategy.
What are the new challenges, Dialogic is facing in the
global market?
For 30 years we have faced challenges in being a global
company. As you say, these challenges continually change. 3G and LTE represent
a big change in the mobile arena since the wireless networks are now the on
ramp” to the internet, instead of just a voice or text communication vehicle.
So as technologies have evolved in the global market, it’s more than just
providing a voice service now. In addition, now we also have OTT players
providing communication services over both the fixed and mobile
internet.
What are the new opportunities in telecom and enterprise
markets?
The challenge is also the opportunity. We are living in
an exciting time for communications. Unprecedented really, as there are
many options to communicate and the newer ones integrate or have options to
integrate voice, data, text and video together. Additionally, smartphones
represent about 12 percent of all mobile phones today, but generate over 80
percent of the mobile data traffic. So as more smartphones come into the
market, communication mechanisms will change even more. Therefore, what I call
integrated communication is one of the new opportunities and this is applicable
to the traditional service providers and the OTT players. Since VAS is
significant in India, and as more smartphones come to India, one can think how
mobile value added services might need to change to incorporate voice, video
and data together. For instance, maybe we will see voice added to mobile
gaming, or video integrated with SMS. Dialogic and our ecosystem can respond
with very innovative services that take advantage of the bandwidth in the
advanced networks.
What is your M&A strategy?
Right now, we are focused on organically growing the
company.
What are your focus areas in innovating products?
We are always looking ahead. We look at the potential
challenges, opportunities and problems that might come up and work to offer
solutions to the market when they are required in the market. This has served
us well for 30 years. The impact of IP in mobile communications is one area we
are looking at now.
