I have been at the Dialogic analyst conference for the past day or so. Last night they took us to Yankee stadium, which I had not seen since my grandfather took me there to see a baseball game as a kid. It did bring back some old memories. Speaking of old memories, my Dad did pass on today at 12:04 pm.

Meantime back to the Dialogic conference. I normally would not cover Dialogic as they are normally seen by CS as an infrastructure company, and by their statement they make building blocks (gateways, media servers, IP PBXs, etc.) that support collaborative applications. So is that reason enough for me to be here… I think it is.

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Ascendant Systems, based in Redwood City, now a subsidiary of RIM, spoke last night about how they used the Dialogic HMP to support fixed/mobile convergence for the enterprise edition for Blackberrys. They will also support smart phones and other 3G phones. This service called the MVS mobility suite allows you to extend the corporate users ID and included such features as: hold, transfer, park, go to voice mail, mute, allow call, block call, and add people to a voice conference on an ad-hoc basis. This by no means is a complete list of features.

Today, Nick Jensen, the CEO of Dialogic in his keynote today not only talked about video convergence but about Web 2.0 convergence (which is timely since the Web 2.0 expo is next week in San Francisco). Dialogic is actually a conglomeration of 7 different companies, with the two latest acquisitions being Cantata and OpenMediaLabs. They are now about 850 people and almost $200M in revenues.

Nick talked about deep packet inspection to examine content in that many of the carriers want to price it differently and also to prevent video spam. He also talked about the hybrid market, and how TDM PBXs would be around for the next decade, but that things would slowly move over to IP PBXs. Dialogic’s IP revenue growth was only 19% of revenues in 2006, 27% in 2007, and expected to be 40% this year and about 50% next year (not including any acquisitions).

Although Dialogic is infrastructure, it is infrastructure that supports collaborative applications. Although they themselves do not do applications they do make the building blocks for them. Most of the people at Dialogic are old telephone guys, but you can teach an old dog new tricks and some of them are starting to think like Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. They will probably provide a connection to Facebook, make their API’s available and maybe even host a SaaS to help new companies with a Dialogic environment that they can build their new products/services on. They eventually may even embrace open source in the same way that SocialText does today i.e. the freemium model, with some services for free and premium services paid for.

In addition, their roadmap includes more work around security (i.e. face detection functions for video servers) and dealing with VoIP spamming. They are also looking at increased density (of ports) and scalability on each of their servers this year.
Although not a collaborative application per se, it was interesting to be at this analyst event and see what the players lower on the stack have on their roadmap, how they think, and what their plans for the future are.