NET Acquires Quintum, VoIP Gateway Manufacturer

TMC's Greg Galitzine and Rich Tehrani wrote excellent articles (here & here) on NET (Network Equipment Technologies, Inc) acquiring Quintum, a maker of VoIP gateways. According to Greg's article, NET President and CEO Nicholas Keating, Jr. (no relation) remarked, “The acquisition of Quintum reflects NET’s strategy to broaden our VoIP product solutions. This will add further scale to our growing VoIP business and put us in a better position to address enterprise and government customer requirements. NET and Quintum share a common vision for the converged unified messaging and unified communications markets. Our technologies, product strategy and sales focus are highly complementary.”
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\nI've always been impressed with Quintum's VoIP gateways and wrote a couple reviews on their Tenor product line. Quintum sells VoIP gateways for Microsoft’s Unified Communications solutions, including being a Certified Partner for Office Communications Server 2007. NET has partnered with Microsoft and Unisys to provide voice integration into hosted exchange environments. This TMC Labs review snippet I wrote back in 2003 sums up the technology NET is acquiring with this acquisition:
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All things being equal, TMC Labs found that Quintum can “squeeze” more voice conversations into a given T1 circuit than many competing products. The reason is their “PacketSaver” technology, which combines voice packets from several calls into one IP packet by maximizing the data utilization of the packet, which often has unused overhead space. Essentially, the way it works is that PacketSaver multiplexes multiple individual VoIP sessions into consolidated IP packets, thereby maximizing the utilization of the IP packet. By reducing the IP packet overhead you can reduce the total amount of bandwidth needed to support VoIP calls. As a side effect, because PacketSaver reduces the total number of packets used for VoIP traffic, it also reduces the chances of packet loss -- another factor that can affect voice quality.
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\nIn addition to this unique “PacketSaver” technology, Quintum also is unique in its ability to intelligently switch calls from VoIP to a PSTN line if jitter, latency or packet loss reaches a certain threshold. This happens completely transparently to the caller. All the caller may hear is brief period of silence while the call is switched from IP to PSTN. We tested this functionality on several of Quintum’s past and present products and it works quite well. This helps alleviate “quality of service” concerns that customers may have in purchasing a VoIP gateway.

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\nYou can check out my full review here. Rich Tehrani got some quotes from Quintum's VP of Marketing, Chuck Rutledge, who I have also talked to in the past and Chuck helped put this acquisition into perspective, so go check out Rich's article.