It is funny when I get asked by people why the VoIP market is growing so fast. I often have to stop and think about just how broad the VoIP space is. You literally have products for the military, education, salesforce automation/mobility, softswitches, session border controllers, etc. The list is literally endless. As soon as you think you have them written down, another segment comes up. VoIP headsets, p2p SIP clients, bluetooth VoIP headsets, etc.

A company called Octasic occupies a niche in VoIP and is doing quite well in it. Their forte is the echo cancellation business. They also focus on compression but for now this might make them some of the most focused players in a very broad VoIP space.

Their echo canceller is quite good. I have heard it in action. While my testing was far from scientific, my ear could tell the difference. This is why companies like Aastra selected the Octasic OCT6100 for their CNX conference bridge appliance.

The company has some other wins coming soon but for a small group of dynamic people shipping five million echo cancellation ports a quarter is pretty amazing. This is especially staggering when you consider they only have 50 customers.

Why is this important? As the VoIP ecosystem grows, the niche players all grow and get better at what they do. These companies in turn allow larger players to focus on their core competencies. Echo cancellation is an important technology that gets overlooked often. It is part of an overall solution but people using communications products can tell the difference between good and bad (or no) echo cancellation.