Online StoreInterview with Serge Forest – VP Marketing for Sangoma
Serge Forest is the new VP of Marketing at Sangoma so we wanted to touch bases with him and see where Sangoma stands on some issues and how they are positioning their products in this competitive marketplace.
888VS: Sangoma is a major player when it comes to PCI interface cards for IP PBX systems, but for those out there who have never heard of Sangoma, why don’t you give us your best pitch as to who Sangoma is and the products that Sangoma offers.
SF: Sangoma is a premium provider of voice and data connectivity components for software-based communication applications. We build data cards, telephony cards, VoIP gateways and connectivity software that are used in leading PBX, IVR, Contact Center and data communication applications. Basically, if one has a software-based communication applications running on a general-purpose processor, one can use Sangoma products to efficiently connect to legacy telephony networks or data networks. We’ve been doing this since 1984 and are a profitable, growing public company dedicated to making software communication applications run better and more cost effectively.
888VS: What makes Sangoma interface cards different from the competition?
SF: Ok, so focusing on our telephony boards, we have two types of competition: legacy telephony boards, and ‘new breed’ telephony cards. The legacy board vendors designed their first generation cards over 10-15 years ago and adopted the philosophy of putting a lot of Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) on the card for voice processing. Clearly, this architecture is not cost effective nor “practical’ for the world of host-based processing and fast host processors we now live in. I will not talk too much about these legacy guys because we just don’t see them much in our space. They are currently running on their installed base and have very little traction in the new set of applications coming out.
As for the new breed of vendors, we are certainly the largest telephony interface board vendor that is truly application and operating system agnostic. We run on Asterisk, FreeSwitch, CallWeaver, YATE and many other open source projects. We run on Windows as much as Linux. We have the most number of independent applications running compared to all other new breed vendors. And we have the best support for all international telephony protocols. So all around, we feel we have the most complete product line.
In terms of engineering, the cards are based on a modular design that offers unmatched reliability and flexibility. But more on that later. One of our long-time distributors, Halokwadrat based in Eastern Europe, has recently published an interesting paper on why they think Sangoma has a better product and history of innovation compared to some of our “new breed” competition. It’s an interesting read I think:
http://www.halokwadrat.pl/sangoma-vs.-digium.html
888VS: It has been said that Sangoma cards are manufactured for ruggedized environments, what is it about your manufacturing process that gives your cards this reputation?
SF: We split the card telephony interface from the PC interface by using a common PCI main board for all designs. Our 25+ years experience in PC hardware has shown us that complex standards like PCI and PICe are continually being extended, and that motherboard designers will explore new corners of the design envelope in order to gain an advantage in performance. The unique split design ensured that any PCI interface issue would be solved once only for the entire range of existing cards, and for all cards to come.
Obviously the split design is more expensive to manufacture, but it pays for itself every day in terms of reduced support and reduced RMA handling by distributors, resellers and the supplier, and reduced engineering time on new product development at Sangoma. It is a win-win situation in which Sangoma, distributors and customers all benefit. Other card manufacturers often use different PCI technologies for different cards, which has been the source of many problems related to compatibility, interrupt sharing and performance. If you use Sangoma cards, these are just non-issues.
888VS: What kind of port densities are available on both your analog and digital cards?
SF: We can go as low as 2 ports of analog, all the way to 8 T1/E1 (or 240 channels) on a single small form-factor card. And we have tested systems with four (4) 8-span cards (that’s 960 channels) in a single system. What’s also interesting is that we have mixed mode cards, that mix digital telephony, with analog, in a single card.
888VS: What PBX platforms are the most common ones used with Sangoma hardware?
SF: Obviously, a number of the most popular PBX platforms using our hardware find their roots in open source projects. We have trixbox CE/Pro, Elastix, PBXWare, PBXact, and a number of others yet to be announced that started off as open source projects. We also have 3CX, Brekeke, Dialexia, PBXnSIP, PrettyMay and others to be announced that run software-based PBX applications that are not rooted in open source. Of course, people can use our cards with their favorite download of Asterisk, FreeSwitch, CallWeaver, Yate or other and build their own platform if they want.
888VS: What are the advantages of a card-based gateway versus an external gateway?
SF: The market demands all-in-one communication systems. With an internal gateway card, that runs on the same server/system as the application, our customers and channel partners can deliver a single-box system (as opposed to delivering an external gateway plus an application box), that is already pre-configured and ready to go. The solution becomes easier to build, ship, deploy, troubleshoot and support. Internal gateways truly reduce the total cost of ownership of a PBX system compared to external gateway systems.
888VS: Since there aren’t drivers for Windows-based products like 3CX, these users can utilize Netborder Express. Can you explain how that works to provide TDM interfaces to systems like that?
SF: Actually, Sangoma has been providing drivers for both Linux and Windows for years. But these are low-level drivers, that would require the application to supply its own telephony protocol and media processing stacks. Open source projects supply all the protocol stacks and are a perfect fit for integrating at a low level API. Windows applications have also integrated to our low-level Windows APIs. YATE is a project that runs our cards under Windows. One “commercial” project using our low-level drivers on Windows was done by a company named PrettyMay, a maker of Skype-based PBX systems. One other is a large telephony equipment manufacturer about to launch a new Windows-based PBX system.
However, most commercial applications do not want to mess with low level drivers and telephony/media protocol stacks. They simply want to talk SIP to any device to which they connect (whether it’s phones of cards). Sangoma has created NetBorder Express, a soft-gateway application that includes all required telephony protocol stacks and allows applications to simply talk SIP to access our telephony interfaces. NetBorder Express turns our telephony cards into full-fledged TDM-to-SIP gateways, with management capabilities, routing, etc. The cards can still live in the same server as the application, or run in different servers.
888VS: Is the Netborder Express solution going to supplant wanpipe for Linux or will there continue to be free drivers available for Linux versus having to purchase Netborder Express for Windows?
SF: Sangoma will continue offering free wanpipe drivers in both Windows and Linux. NetBorder Express is only required when and if customers need to rely on Sangoma to provide a full SIP interface including telephony stacks or need some of the advanced features such as our management interface, the ability to scale to 960 ports per system or our load balancing and failover routing.
NetBorder is also available in Windows and Linux (Linux version in Beta currently) and is licensed separately.
So the drivers will continue to be free on both OS and NetBorder (on both OS as well) will be licensed at a very reasonable price for customers who require the extra level of functionality provided.
888VS: One big advantage of having a TDM card installed into a system is to provide a high quality timing source. If someone doesn’t need a TDM card, you have a USB timing device they can use, can you tell us how that helps solve timing issues?
SF: Without a TDM hardware device, some open source projects loose their only reliable timing source. Sangoma offers VoiceTime, a USB device that provides a reliable hardware-based source, that software running on the host can use to drive their real-time code. This solves numerous issues related to latency and audio quality in general.
888VS: As the internet continues to improve and VoIP services become more reliable what role will Sangoma play in that market and how long do you think it will be before we finally see the end of traditional circuits or even just the end of analog circuits?
SF: Some have been predicting the downfall of the PSTN for years. We believe traditional telephony lines will be around for a very long time. The transition to pure IP will come faster in some geographies than in others, but we still see that reliable, widespread SIP trunking is still in its infancy, even in the US. SIP turnking to the large enterprise, call centers or managed service providers is starting to take off, but the SMB is still not budging. In the cases where SIP trunking is being used, people use PSTN lines for backup and for 911 or other critical services. So it will be a hybrid world for years…
That being said, Sangoma already has products that thrive in IP-only architectures. We’ve briefly discuss the VoiceTime product above. The NetBorder Call Analyzer and NetBorder Agent Bridge products, focused on the call center market, have also been designed for (and are being deployed in) IP-only networks. The Call Analyzer product provides reliable, real-time answering machine detection for automated dialer applications (such as ones based on Asterisk, Vicidial, Genesys or Oracle Contact Center Anywhere), while the Agent Bridge enables remote agents. These products have been and will continue to be deployed against SIP trunks, or be combined with our cards and gateways for TDM-based deployments.
You will see other products coming from Sangoma in the coming months and years that address this ultimate IP-only network. These networks also have connectivity issues!
For more information about, please visit Sangoma.com
888VoipStore: Sangoma products page
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