El-Mohri on IP Communications Events and Dialexia

I love interviews, when it's me interviewing others...

Dialexia, who make IP communications work (that really is their maxim), is unique and non-traditional in many ways. Unlike other company directors' typical title pairing, Mohamed El-Mohri is the CTO and President and his partner Ahmed Aina is the CEO.
 
Ahmed joined from MediaSoft Telecom, which was a CTI tools developer, as CFO (sold to Bell).  Mohamed was a service provider since 1998 using H323 platforms. His graduate studies involved speech technology, cognition and synthesis. The two began as an ITSP offering termination, using the AAA Radius protocol for billing and CDR and Quintum and Cisco for gateways. In 2001 they discovered SIP and decided to develop their own products and founded Dialexia.
 
Like many of us, they were and are driven to participate in IP communications global conferences in order to learn and develop business to perfect their solutions. In 1998, they first attended the CTI shows in L.A. and then switched to VON (their original favorite show) when they began fax to email services.
 
\"IP communications companies want to listen to, network with, be educated by, and develop business with new and old companies with fresh ideas, so this is why we are enjoying ITEXPO most, where we take away more valid leads than any other conference. Rich Tehrani and the TMCnet group promote interaction between us and them and between us and our market,\" says Mohamed. \"I was shocked the first time Rich called my office and really listened to me.\"
 
Mohamed mentioned they have participated in VoiceCon, Cebit, Gitex, and France's COIP (no fee to get in, small, where 75% of discussions resulted in real business). They used to attend Supercomm and decided to try it again after viewing the new NXTCOMM08 among the DIDX-sponsored events and were pleased with the improvements. They met Patton who exhibited at NXTcomm08, and now they bundle their products with Dialexia's PBX.
 
I laughed when he shared with me the phenomenom of most shows where those attending booths of many large companies see the exhibitors finish eating their booth cookies and then they attend to you. Dialexia also attended a voIP conference in Shanghai but found a communication barrier like many USA-based companies might experience. Perhaps conferences will pay attention to this insight and add features that assist with language barriers to developing business.
 
Back to Dialexia history, it registered with Microsoft in 2002 and beta-tested for the RTC. Next... a search for SIP stack which led them to DynamicSoft (later acquired by Cisco in 2004 for \$55 million) and later chose Indigo of Belgium because Dialexia wanted to develop using Java. Their first PBX was built in 2002 for SMB and from there the softwitch with billing for small to medium-size ITSP, all SIP! Two quality products...
 
Monetizing IP communications was a reality!
 
\"A few glitches in the beginning were quickly ironed out. I.e., when there was no RTP, the need to sniff RTP was important and listen before ending the call,\" states Mohamed El-Mohri with refreshing honesty. \"We added an RTP relay. We went to the SIP IT interop forum in Ottawa, New Hampshire, and Calgary for more testing.\"
 
Dialexia's Dialgate product uses its Imozaik terminationg platform. Any complaints from ITSPs get support in-house as Dialexia uses what it sells. They partner with Quintum and Mediatrix based in Canada. Check out Quintum Tim Thornton's Linkedin recommendation of Dialexia with credit for being a valuable beta site for several of Quintum's SIP directives.
 
Regarding requirement, they have beta-tested with Grandstream and are using AudioCode, Polycom, Linksys... whatever their client asks for.
 
The company started with a client base of residential and SMB and added ITSPs next. It has eyes on IPTV and fixed mobile convergence for the future under Imozaic. Dialexia currently sells the Imozaic portal for softswitch to start an ITSP quickly. They added the module plugin to Joomla to communicate with the softswitch. 
 
One of the last two questions to Mohamed was, \"What do you do differently and better than others in regards to human resources, your team?\"
 
\"There is no difference among us. I sit next to them and work with them. We go to lunch together. We don't hide anything. We share everything. It's not teamwork. It's family work,\" Mohamed El-Mohri shares. \"Anyone who needs to leave us, we want to know why. Sometimes we realize we are growing people who may end up working elsewhere which is a compliment to us. We teach them all SIP from scratch.\"
 
In conclusion, what's up new? A conference server, a voice conference bridge embedded in the IP-PBX for enterprise solution. It will also be available via license to ITSPs who take advantage of Dialexia's softswitch. Dialexia is ready to rollout a hosted PBX soon because of massive number of customer requests. It will be IMS-ready. Last, Dialexia is in the process of offering implementation of the DIDX SIP trunking and DID from 55 countries for their softswitch customers, another way to help its customers monetize IP communications and make more end-users very very happy.