AltiGen aims higher in VoIP business food chain

Having found a comfortable customer niche in the small/medium-sized IP business space, AltiGen Communications is moving up the ladder and chasing bigger customers with new system software that enables increased voice-over-IP density, higher capacity per system and new contact center capabilities.

With the new software, AltiGen’s customers with up to 1000 extensions can link multiple local and remote phone systems together over IP networks. The software expands the number of IP and analog extensions on a single server to 180. Additionally, the company is introducing a new architecture--the Distributed Intelligence Network Architecture [DINA]--that links multiple servers and solves a problem that the company had experienced with smaller customers.

“If the customer grew beyond the capacity of a server, we could put in additional servers, but they’d have to be administered by a separate administrative GUI,” said Richard De Soto, AltiGen’s senior vice president. “That isn’t the primary way companies would like to do it.”

DINA, he said, allows a single GUI to manage multiple systems. The DINA manager, also being introduced, allows administrators to manipulate the networks from anywhere in the world.

“That solves a big problem for our customers and also helps us move up the mid-sized chain,” said De Soto.

VoIP continues to grow in a soft market, based primarily on its ability to return on investment by offering more features with less costs, De Soto said. AltiGen’s technology can be implemented in a migratory manner “so we don’t ask them to build up their IP infrastructure if they don’t want to,” he said. “They can use the existing circuit switch wiring for installed telephones.”

The AltiGen basic package is pretty inclusive, De Soto said.

“You get voice mail, ACD [automatic call distributor], auto-attendant e-mail, CTI [computer telephone integration] all built in,” he said. “You pay extra if you want to add voice-over-IP trunking, voice-over-IP phones and contact centers.”

The IP quality is “well above the best cell call and quite often equal to circuit-switched voice communications,” De Soto said. “If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be getting customers.”

And the company is getting customers, he said. After a downturn in last year’s third quarter, revenue increased 8%. De Soto expects the trend to continue.

“It’s not growing rapidly,” he said. “It’s been steadily increasing. I think it’s coming back.”