As my colleague Mark Nadeski highlighted in his recent blog post, we are very excited about our 12 months of multicore campaign, which highlights a unique multicore application each month. I personally find it exciting that the application for August is enterprise gateways. I have been an active participant, immersed in the Voice over IP market, from the early adopter stage to mainstream solutions. I joined a start up, Telogy Networks, in the late 90’s as we stormed the market with VoIP software (running on Texas Instruments’ DSPs), demonstrating telephony connections at the early Voice on the ‘Net shows. As we worked with a set of global customers testing our solution for clarity, echo and latency, it was fun to observe the various worldwide phone answering protocols to the English version of “hello?” We quickly moved past mere voice communication to conquer the plethora of global yet obscure dial tones, data modems and facsimile transmissions. The challenge was to detect and properly respond to the tone, but only the real tones. I recall an applications engineer on our team who could make his voice sound like a number four tone and could invoke the competitive software erroneously from voice mode to tone detection mode…ah, those were the days. As the Internet telephony market became an increasingly viable alternative to traditional circuit switched voice, we were acquired by Texas Instruments and we expanded our market to a full portfolio of VoIP solutions including IP phones and enterprise and carrier media gateways.
In recent years, my focus has been in our wireless base station market, where the current trend is the ever increasing volume of data traffic. Texts, email, traffic heavy application connections are all increasing while wireless voice calls are decreasing. This makes sense from a consumer perspective, as we observe the ever changing social behavior patterns of society. Although voice calls will continue to be a smaller portion of the overall wireless traffic they will not become extinct.
Instead, I see “voice” as a key part of success. While we may rely on our handheld devices for mobility and convenience, when it comes to that important call, that critical conversation, we depend on that wired phone. And, in most enterprises today, at least a portion of the solution is voice over IP; somewhere in the network there is a media gateway. While email and the occasional text provide efficient means of global business communications, when we need to convey that important one on one message, or the benefit of active group discussion, we need that good ‘ole live voice. Whether it is the desk phone, with a speaker and mute button, or PC telephony as in integral part of a collaborative teleconference tool, we still rely on enterprise media gateways to get the job done.
The VoIP market is burgeoning with creative enterprise telephony products that include features such IVR, voicemail, voice detection and teleconferencing, all the while interfacing with legacy telephony infrastructure, and supporting traditional telephony features such as facsimile transmission. As the use of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) sessions increase, Session Border Controller products expand and consolidation of enterprise network continues. So, as I approach my 15th anniversary with TI, I am proud to see how our hard work over the years with customers, operators, IT managers and partners, has led to the development of higher performance, scalable multicore solutions for the demanding enterprise gateway market.
I invite you to check out more details on this month’s multicore application with a product bulletin of the C665x multicore DSP and the Ask the Expert video on enterprise gateways that plays an integral part of our business lives.
What is your prediction for enterprise communications in 10 years from now?