Your product plans call for the development of a product that requires multi-channel media-processing resources. You\u2019ve looked at the market and have concluded that a PC-based system could meet your functional, capacity, performance, and cost requirements. And with the financial constraints and lower-demand realities of today\u2019s market and time-to-market delays not supporting in-house development, you are looking at what is available as a value-adding platform. But sometimes all the criteria that should be considered are not made obvious by only looking at the requirements of today\u2019s product due to the long-tail ramifications of the initial selection.<\/p>\n
\u201cLong-tail ramifications\u201d? Well, yes, but a \u201clong tail\u201d different from the one Chris Anderson wrote about a few years ago. The consequences of a platform\u2019s selection will be around a long time, often much longer than imagined and well beyond that initial product. You and your channel partners will invest in the competencies required to support the new platform in marketing, product development, and customer service. You and your channel partners will also invest in product inventory, although software-only strategies can reduce that number, sometimes to zero. Since this big brontosaurus-like tail is so difficult to move, it will shape your marketing strategy, constraining your choices to those supported by today\u2019s possibly narrowly focused selection. Once you\u2019ve absorbed those large initial investments, moving to a new platform is a tough call. So, it pays to look beyond today\u2019s requirements and do your best to cover tomorrow\u2019s as well.<\/p>\n
The best way to avoid being put into a box is to select a comprehensive, functionally open-ended telephony platform that requires no compromises today, yet has the architectural flexibility to support nearly any direction you care to take in the future.<\/p>\n
Take, as an example (just to pick one at random), multi-line fax resources required for an enterprise server targeting the Fortune 1000 for use in IP networks. What requirements does this suggest?<\/p>\n
You could meet these requirements by going with the incumbent, but what about the future? Let\u2019s say you\u2019ve discovered that with a growing partnership with a PBX manufacturer you see an opportunity to repurpose your enterprise-fax application for the small-medium enterprise as a software add-in to your partner\u2019s UM subsystem. But the $450-plus per channel you\u2019ve been paying for fax resources suddenly looms large, effectively nipping your idea in the bud.<\/p>\n
Suppose you need to add voice to your product, possibly as a prompt to input an extension. Suddenly, your choice of a platform that can\u2019t support voice shuts you out of that application.<\/p>\n
Suppose you find that all the propaganda you\u2019ve heard about G.711 pass-though being worthless in IP networks wasn\u2019t true. Perhaps it\u2019s as simple as the SIP-trunking service provider not offering T.38, yet always delivering error-free G.711 faxes or perhaps an enterprise customer using an IP PBX, which has yet to add T.38 support, as a gateway. Lack of G.711 support can hurt in unexpected ways.<\/p>\n
Some software-only T.38 fax-resource products began as an emulation of a T.38-only hardware resource, so that\u2019s all it does. Others are produced by organizations with no signal-processing skills, so they have no HMP fax modems. But there are fax-resource platforms that were built from the ground up as a scalable and extensible telephony platform, a platform that not only supports all the media-processing technologies you need now or in the future, but also what could become critical telephony functions for a new market initiative.<\/p>\n
So, what might the additional requirements be? The best protection is to choose an open, extensible, general-purpose telephony platform-one that is architecturally open-ended. Of course, having the industry\u2019s best fax technology at the best price is required for today\u2019s requirement. But what about tomorrow\u2019s?<\/p>\n
Here are a few things to look for:<\/p>\n
By the way, BladeWare<\/a><\/em> and, BladeWare<\/em> combined with Sangoma<\/a> boards, meets these criteria\u2026all of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Your product plans call for the development of a product that requires multi-channel media-processing resources. You\u2019ve looked at the market…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bladeware","category-t-38"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commetrex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commetrex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commetrex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commetrex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commetrex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/commetrex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commetrex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commetrex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commetrex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}