The Communications Powerhouse That is Sangoma

Sangoma has quietly built a communications empire – while many weren’t watching, they made strategic acquisition after acquisition and now are responsible for a tremendous portion of the world’s communications. What is more interesting is the diversity of products and services the company now offers and especially, where they’re headed.

Sangoma really made a name for itself once the open-source communications platform Asterisk burst onto the scene in 2004. Sangoma provided telephony hardware for Asterisk which had better voice quality than what Digium, the company behind Asterisk was able to make.

This led to animosity between Sangoma and Digium which is understandable – imagine, you help provide a free open-source phone system and your funding mechanism, which was hardware, was being undercut by a company that didn’t have your open-source community overhead.

At the high-end of the market, Dialogic made high-performance, high-quality boards but didn’t focus too much on open-source.

Over time, Dialogic saw its share of telecom erode thanks to Asterisk, Digium and Sangoma. Then Twilio started to compete with all of these companies with cloud-based solutions.

Over the last decade, Sangoma has made eight acquisitions and now owns enterprise gateways, SBCs, they purchased Digium and Schmooze, the open-source Asterisk competitor and maker of FreePBX. They purchased the CCD division of Dialogic, giving them access to carriers, international customers and the enterprise. They purchased VoIP Supply, an online telecom reseller and SIP trunking provider, VoIP Innovations. This last buy brought recurring revenue to 55% of total revenue, which is quite impressive for a company many think of as primarily selling boards.

Around ten to fifteen years ago, they were considered a small player compared to Digium and Sangoma and they ended up rolling up a good portion of the market.

Look at the breadth of the current offering. UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, TaaS, DaaS and MaaS. It is bewildering really but it allows the company to do things few if any others can do. They can provide virtually all of the communication needs of any organization – all the way to the SIP trunks.

The synergies between their open-source solutions and paid services are just beginning. Owning hardware and software means they can integrate in ways other providers may not be able to match. The same way Apple Airpods use a proprietary protocol to communicate with Apple devices – allowing Apple to provide benefits competitors cannot.

Similar to Apple, Sangoma has embarked upon a march to services.

They also seem to now offer solutions for every segment of the communications market. They have UC and cloud offerings for small and medium companies an access control solutions are on the way. MSPs and are enterprises get software, virtual machines of the UC solutions, wholesale SIP trunking and the Dialogic solutions. Developers and system integrators get open source communications, CPaaS, boards and more.

Sangoma Connect is their WebRTC UC solution which is a client and server supporting chat, presence, screen sharing, fax SMS, contacts, file sharing and more. The company’s phones and headsets auto-provision across the company’s UC and UCaaS product line.

Sangoma Meet is a multi-party, video conferencing and desktop sharing, cloud-based service which supports up to 50 users and is currently free.

Sangoma SmartOffice (see figure on the right) consists of a SmartOffice Manager which handles IoT devices and SmartOffice Gateway is a Zigbee-based LAN gateway.

Recently, they hired Mo Nezarati as Chief Product & Strategy Officer. Mo was a past ITEXPO keynoter and was VP of UC Applications and Cloud at Avaya. Before that, he was CEO of Esna Technologies for 26 years where he was able to keep his company on the forefront of communications technology for a quarter-century before it was purchased by Avaya.

In short, the company is really well-positioned from carrier services to retail and a ton of software and service options. They have some exciting things in the works we hope to share with you when they are launched. For example, they hope to leverage the development in their open-source community to enhance their CPaaS offering. Finally, there will be much tighter integration across platforms, software and cloud offerings. They also expect to make more strategic acquisitions.

It’s impressive to see the company continue to grow and innovate after doing so consistently for so many decades.


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