Mr. Puette: Centigram was one of the pioneers in the voice messaging business in the late 1980s, starting out originally by developing a PC- based voice messaging system for small business. In the early 1990s, we migrated the functionality upward and were able to sell to enterprise customers and service providers. The service provider business became a bigger and bigger piece of our company and we decided in May 1998 to sell the enterprise piece, or CPE business, to Mitel and focus 100 percent of our energies on the service provider market. At the same time that we decided to focus on the service provider market, we broadened our product line to really include all of what might be considered today in the business as enhanced services for telcom service providers. Those services include voice messaging, fax messaging, pre-paid systems, short message service, one number service products, message delivery products, and many more.
TWST: What are the most significant trends, developments or changes you
anticipate in your markets over the next several years?
Mr. Puette: Customer churn is a growing issue. One major way to
minimize churn is to provide customers with the best set of services
that they find to be important, such as short message or one number
service. And a dominant trend will certainly be to have suppliers that
can provide a whole host of enhanced services on a single platform, so
you get a very cost-effective way to acquire the products. Certainly,
another thing that's going to be happening in our industry is increased
focus in the unified messaging space to integrate voice mail, fax mail,
e-mail, and then the whole world of the Internet. IP-based systems today
by-pass the traditional Class 5 switches in central offices and
basically use the internet; so our products going forward will need to
operate on IP packet-based networks as well as switched networks.
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