Article Excerpt:
TWST: What is Sangoma Technologies?Mr. Mandelstam: Sangoma is a company that manufactures PCI cards that are related to wide area networking and telephony, and we have been in the business for over 20 years. We were bought by a public company in the year 2000, and we are on the TSX Venture Exchange. Many of our customers have, in fact, invested in our company so our successes are returned to them. We are one of the few companies where you can actually invest that are targeted to the voice space, specifically the open source voice space. All the rest are either private companies or are so big that one's investment is rather diffused. Investing in a Cisco or a Nortel doesn't really get you very focused on the voice world because their businesses are so diffused. So Sangoma is seen as a way to invest in open source voice from the small investor's perspective. To get back to our business, we manufacture PCI cards that, among other things, are used to provide telephony gateways from software-based PBX systems. There are a number of open source telephony projects. The leader is the Asterisk project, and others include Yate, FreeSwitch and a number of other smaller projects. They all need at some stage to connect to the good old PSTN (public switched telephone network), otherwise known as plain old telephone system, POTS. There may be all kinds of voice over IP and CRM systems and interactive voice response systems and PBXs and call centers and many other applications, but at some stage, somewhere they need to connect to the real telephone system, and that connection is what we provide. We have a range of products that do PSTN connections, but most of our business is still data, which is involved in moving data over the Internet or over other networks, using PCs as servers.
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