VON: Dialcom takes on big guys in unified collaboration

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Unified collaboration provider Dialcom introduced the North American market to Spontania, a real-time collaboration platform, at the VON show this week. The platform allows users, regardless of location, to communicate via instant messaging, voice, video and data in real time over any device or network through an intuitive, PC-based user interface.

The technology has been available to Madrid, Spain-based Dialcom’s more than 100 European customers, spanning the country and including telcos, media, banking, insurance, services and manufacturing, since 2002. As the new name in the North American market, Bob Johnson, president and chief operating officer of Dialcom, said they will be up against a lot of the big names – Microsoft, Polycom, Tandberg, Cisco and IBM to name a few, but he’s not worried.

“We are competing with those guys, and I am happy to do that,” he said, adding that Spontania is a really positive, quick and simple tool that can immediately rectify a lot of the issues inherent in existing solutions.
The larger providers, Dialcom’s competitors, have primarily launched their conferencing and collaboration platforms through acquisitions. According to Johnson, none of these solutions are purely software-based, like Dialcom’s, and they are often difficult and complex to implement. Polycom’s solution, for one, is based on IP multi-media subsystem architecture compability, to bring conferencing to IMS. Similarly, Microsoft is focused on leveraging a partnership with Nortel to meet all of the enterprise customer’s telephony needs by combining PBXs with server software functionality, using Microsoft’s Office Communications Server and Nortel’s Feature Server.
Spontania is sold as a software-only application and is designed for businesses of any size. From a user interface using multiple windows, users can IM an associate, click to enter a conference and communicate via voice, video or data. The software also benefits from coming out of Europe, where the 3G standard drove the product to be interoperable and effective over mobile devices as well.

Johnson said the company saw North America as a primary market and was ready to get in on the action. In the US incarnation, the platform encourages telepresence for businesses that might otherwise travel to meet together, as well as application- and file-sharing, whiteboard capabilities and the ability to connect mobile devices anywhere in the world. An administrator account can manage communications and allows others to interact on a common document, application or file.

The Spontania platform is premises-based and compatible with existing communication infrastructure to preserve legacy investments in video conferencing equipment, IM, email and IPBX. Dialcom has a patent pending on its adaptive bandwidth management technology in the US, which the company said keeps bandwidth usage to a minimum, even during video and graphic intensive sessions.