Conversations surrounding innovations in the cloud are slowly shifting from awareness to education for conversion. The opportunities are known, yet a number of companies continue to limit their exploration for fear of change, perceived security vulnerabilities, misunderstood opportunities or a simple lack of time to investigate options that can lead to improved operations and considerable savings.

This is where service providers have to spend a great deal of time, educating their audience on the importance of their offerings and the value derived from early adoption. For those companies ready to migrate to the cloud, it’s a simple demonstration of the solutions available to support their initiatives. For those still hesitant, it’s a matter of understanding the obstacles and recognizing the pain points that can be overcome or eliminated with this change.

Dialogic is at the forefront in empowering service providers to have the information, technology and solutions backing to meet these challenges and market demands. Through its innovative solutions, the company enables service providers and application developers to deliver media-rich communications across advanced networks. The company’s focus is on boosting reliability, enhancing the impact of applications and expanding the capacity of congested networks to help providers meet growing demands.

At the upcoming ITEXPO event in Anaheim, Dialogic’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Alan Percy (News - Alert), will be on hand to share the latest in Dialogic’s innovations, including the PowerMedia XMS 3.0 media server software. In an interview with TMC’s Rich Tehrani (News - Alert), Percy shared his insight on the adoption of unified communications, collaboration, corporate awareness of network security, WebRTC and much more. Check out this interview in full below.

• Have we finally reached an inflection point with Unified Communications adoption? What is driving or hindering the market?

I do believe Unified Communications has finally reached mass adoption, with most of the analysts agreeing that steady growth in user adoption is on track. Fueling this growth is the maturity of the offers, cloud adoption and bundling Unified Communications with business productivity software. Microsoft, Google, Cisco (News - Alert) and others lead the pack with very comprehensive offers that are reliable, effective and easy to use. That said, confusion over decisions on delivering UC from the cloud vs. on premise and recent outages that have occurred in high-profile cloud services is causing hesitation with decision makers – causing indecision on the right approach to deliver reliable services for their employees and subscribers.

• How do you feel collaboration software/services are helping workers today?

It is clear that UC has made a huge impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of workers. One of the key features of UC that has dramatically improved collaboration is desktop sharing – barely a day goes by in my own work when we don’t end up in one or more desktop sharing sessions. It might be to review some slides, work on a spreadsheet or develop written content in Word – having the ability to pull multiple people from different work locations into a joint work session has significantly improved efficiency and the quality of the resulting work. 

• Has corporate awareness of security threats increased over the past year?  Have security practices been adjusted as a result?

After this last year’s series of well publicized security breaches, CIOs have to be losing sleep, concerned about their own corporate situation. It does seem that credit card numbers are the hot commodity, closely followed by identities – an effective security strategy prevents embarrassing (and potentially career-affecting) security breaches.   Network perimeter protection along with protection of key communications assets are obvious high priorities for CIOs looking to secure their business assets.

• If your mobile device had integrated software that allowed you to separate your business and personal apps, would you use it?  Why or why not?

It is interesting that other than one of the Blackberry family products, this hasn’t been better addressed before. Much of the “cross contamination” occurs at the mobile device where files, social and email from professional and private sources seem to end up blended together. Only recently did Dropbox and Microsoft’s OneDrive finally support dual identities (professional and private), allowing users to segregate files into their appropriate storage locations.

• How is cloud computing shaking up your product/service offerings?

Cloud computing has been a huge opportunity for Dialogic, allowing the company to offer the media processing and call control products to our customers as either cloud or NFV network services. This allows our customers to achieve their pure-cloud deployment models, while having access to state-of-the-art media services for conferencing, transcoding, recording and playback.   Along with the change in software, comes changes in licensing agreements, allowing customers to “pay as you use”, better fitting their business models of consumption-based billing.

• WebRTC went through a very significant hype cycle.  Will its use cases and adoption live up to that hype?

WebRTC certainly got a lot of attention during 2013-2014, but the relative quiet of the last year shouldn’t be unexpected or overblown. All technologies tend to move from raw excitement into a phase where practical applications start to emerge. We’re just now starting to see customer applications based on WebRTC come to market in forms that can deliver value to the end-customer and profits to service providers and developers. As the products are now maturing, it’s less about the underlying technology and more about the finished application and meeting needs in the respective target market. It is an exciting time to see real applications being deployed with WebRTC – validating much of the promises made years ago.

• What technology has had the greatest impact on your ability to perform your job in the past year?  Explain.

If I had to pick one technology that has made a difference this year in my professional life, it would be Office 365 and its cloud storage. My recent move to Dialogic gave me an opportunity to “push the reset button” on the way I use laptops, tablets and mobile devices – a chance to see if Microsoft’s cloud story was real. It is. I’m now storing all my work-related files in either Exchange or OneDrive for Business – allowing me to access them from either my work-supplied laptop or my personal Surface. In a pinch, I can even access those same files from my Windows phone or any web browser. It’s a new world, where ubiquitous access is possible irrespective of the device.  I have to admit – I like this new world.

• What technology has had the greatest impact on your personal life in the past year?  Explain.

Those of you that are close to me know that I am very active in a high-adventure program the Boy Scouts of America operates, taking crews of youth up to Algonquin Provincial Park in northern Canada for week-long canoe trips into the backcountry. Our expeditions take us far away from cell phone towers and the ability to communicate with the outside world. In year’s past, we’ve tried satellite phones of various brands, but found them unreliable and incredibly expensive for the little use they get. 

This last summer we tried something different, acquiring four Delorme inReach Satellite Communicators – essentially a cross between a GPS and a text-messaging device that communicates via the Iridium satellite network. The devices allowed the crews to communicate with the program operations staff, emergency services and with family members back home at a fraction of the cost relative to making voice calls over satellite. 

As a result, the crews felt comfortable using the devices more often, were able to communicate and better coordinate their activities. As a side benefit, we were able to share a live map with the families back home, showing where each of the crews were during their nightly check-in, giving them the chance to “follow along”.  Having the ability to communicate was a huge advance for our program, thanks to satellite communications technology.

• What innovations do you expect to see in the business communications world in the next year?

I’m expecting to see a much broader adoption of both unified communications and web-based collaboration this next year.   Gone will be the 800-number dial-in with PIN number, replaced with the URL and “click to join”. Many of these platforms and services will benefit from WebRTC and cloud computing, allowing “no plug-in” activation that any consumer can easily navigate. Watch for video to become a greater part of the UC experience too. Expectations and our own vanity are starting to adapt to greater use of video – mostly coming from Facetime and Skype (News - Alert) experiences communicating with family and friends.

• What are you looking forward to at ITEXPO Anaheim?

I’m looking forward to gaining a deeper understanding of the impact of NFV during the dedicated track.  This is a rare opportunity to hear from others working on the technology, gaining insight into their goals, expectations and results.

• Why should attendees come to your session/visit your booth?

As an industry leader in communications networking technology, Dialogic will be sharing some new innovations, including the newly released PowerMedia XMS 3.0 media server software.  XMS 3.0 offers a significant expansion in scaling, reliability and features needed to build large-scale applications, ideal for service providers and application developers. Other innovations include new NFV-ready solutions for NGN, IMS and VoLTE networks. These and other innovations can be seen at the Dialogic booth #418 on the exhibit floor.

In addition to the exhibits, the team from Dialogic is participating in three sessions during ITExpo West this year:

Jim McLaughlin, Product Marketing Manager is participating in Agile Service Delivery in an IMS Network with NFV (NFV-08) starting at 10:00 AM on Tuesday. Jim’s talk will discuss some of the innovations and implications of virtualization and the impact on service delivery.

Alan Percy will be sharing some analysis work done by Dialogic on Open Source (News - Alert) solutions in a session titled Open Source in the Service Provider Network (NFV-04) starting at 4:00 PM on Monday. Attendees will get advanced access to a detailed survey and analysis on open source solutions.

Alan Percy will also be participating in a panel discussion titled Why WebRTC will Improve Customer Experience (COM-15) starting at 1:30 PM on Tuesday. With some recent real-world deployments, Alan will be sharing his observations on how WebRTC, voice and video were leveraged to improve the user experience.