Article Excerpt:
TWST: We'd like to begin with a brief historical sketch of the company and a picture of the things you are doing at the present time.Mr. Mandelstam: The company was started in 1984, so it's more than 20 years old. Our business started off providing WAN data connectivity on PCs, using the PC as a connection vehicle. It remained a small engineering company until 2000, when it was bought out by a public company. Sangoma is now quoted on the Canadian TSX venture exchange. Currently we are involved in two broad areas. One is traffic data communication, moving data through networks like the Internet. The other one is voice gateways from PC-based PBX systems and interactive voice response systems. The gateway hardware we provide connects these voice systems to the PSTN, the public switched telephone network. So broadly speaking we are involved in the transport of voice and data. The data business is more traditional while voice is something fairly new, something we have only seriously addressed in the past year and a half. But voice is a growth market for us. It is quite exciting because it gets us involved in the new world of voice over IP and call centers, software-based PBXs telephony signaling and switching, all net new business.
TWST: What is the competitive landscape and how do you differentiate
yourself within it?
Mr. Mandelstam: In the data field, there are a small number of people
providing similar products, which are wide area network cards for PCs.
It is a fairly small niche market. We have been doing it longer than
anybody else. We compete by providing open source drivers and we have
quite a good reputation in the open source community. We also produce
very high quality products. I guess that our competitive advantage in
the WAN network card business is cost effectiveness and support. On the
voice side, our major competition consists of organizations that have
instigated, own and maintain open source telephony projects. While
developing and maintaining large, complex projects that are free to the
customer, one of the problems is making money. One of their ways of
earning revenue is to build and sell hardware that works in these
environments. These people are our direct competitors, but we just have
more experience in the business. We know how to build hardware. That is
our main line of business and all we do is build hardware and device
drivers for it, so our hardware tends to be more reliable and tends to
provide lower system loads. It's high quality and it's better designed,
just because that's our business. We are doing quite well in the open
PBX market. We provide the lower level device drivers and quality
hardware. Customers get the open source telephony software from other
sources. They will use our card in preference to other cards from our
competitors because they work better.
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