After a short blog hiatus, I am back in the blogging saddle. The integration of Dialogic CCD into Sangoma has been my focus these past 6 or so weeks. Last week I went to MWC and that spurred me to go back to weekly blogging as I saw a lot there – some interesting, some not so interesting.
Like I expected, the big themes of MWC were 5G, cars, Artificial Intelligence and IoT with real time communications. There were cars in many booths, and there were robots seemingly everywhere. And like many buzzword initiatives before it, many companies “glom on” to buzzwords, even though the company may really truly be on the periphery of what is hot that year, or just want to find a way to be associated with the hype word and put it into their messaging.
5G was everywhere. Next big thing. Already here. I don’t know which. But it was everywhere. And there were companies launching it, without any 5G phones. I guess that’s par for the MWC course. No one even blinks about that anymore.
But glomming on to AI and IoT is different. I see companies messaging this that have no business messaging this. Also, on a different level, AI and IoT itself are also overblown in a way. When you look at IVRs, over the past many years there were AI elements in the IVR anyway. People just started calling it something else – AI. Same with IoT.
Anyway, enough of what I’ve seen of MWC marketing hype. Why was I there and why was Sangoma here? Sangoma is all about IoT and AI!!! Seriously MWC to most vendors is all about meetings. Getting business done in an economical fashion.
Many of the CCD products that are part of Sangoma now are used by a service provider type customer. Some are used in some kind of real time value-added service. Gateways are used to either peer into other networks or convert to/from TDM to IP. So yep, everyone is not on IP yet! And there is still basic communications business there to do, and they come to MWC to do business.
As such, there are customers who buy both or either the boards and SP gateways who attend this show. And these service providers also serve the enterprise, and Sangoma has a great story about having enterprise solutions that the service providers can sell to their enterprise customers. So this was a great place for me to meet many of these customers and talk about the transition and future business with Sangoma. I’ll have more to say about Sangoma’s enterprise solutions for service providers in future blogs.
