As we get ready to bid farewell to 2007 and look ahead to 2008, I posed several questions to some of the leading companies in the IP Communications space, among them CommuniGate Systems. Jon Doyle, the company’s Vice President, Business Development, responded.

 

 

JD: 2007 was a great year for CommuniGate Systems. Growing market demands for Unified Communications (News - Alert) and Rich Internet Applications with Flash and AJAX; Powerful widgets embedded into Web sites for communications; Web 2.0 becoming reality... these are the advances that characterized our year. Web 2.0 is emerging as a revenue generator for ISPs and a business tool for enterprises to make communications more effective. The software as a service (SaaS (News - Alert)) model is beginning to build real momentum for unified communications in the small to medium enterprise sector.

 

 

JD: We delivered our Flash Framework Pronto! 1.0 in the spring and then built Pronto! on Adobe AIR, which was shown within the keynote of the Adobe Max event in Chicago.

 

 

JD: We’re hard at work developing some interesting things for next year. CommuniGate Pro 5.2 will feature our new Mobility Suite with support for OTA AirSync + standards based push email, and some interesting developments around CalDAV, a new emerging standard for calendaring. We hope to see CalDAV become quite popular on the mobile market too, if and when the iPhone (News - Alert) provides OTA connectivity to CalDAV in 2008. Ver 5.2 will also include many extensions to our XMPP Presence Services engine, most notably the server to sever connector, allowing CommuniGate Pro to link up to G-Talk and other XMPP-based services. In the late Spring Pronto! 2.0 will be generally available on the Adobe AIR platform, and will include some powerful Hi-Definition Quality Rich Media modules with enhanced features for Unified Communications and Media delivery.

 

 

JD: Yes. CommuniGate Pro 5.2 is coming soon, within a matter of a few weeks actually, and we will discuss some of these features during the Mac World event in January and at the Internet Telephony (News - Alert) event that same month. Later in spring we will release Pronto! 2.0, a big milestone for us.

 

 

JD: There are a good number of exciting trends happening in the network operator segment and we plan to incorporate many of them in our technological roadmap, for example, powerful RIA’s like our Pronto!, SaaS delivery, unified communications with a focus on “Multimedia,” Presence, and delivered under the SaaS model, Professional (Hollywood) Media Delivery via CDNs, digital rights management (DRM), the emergence of standards for “Web 3.0” and specialized fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) for Cable/Broadband/Mobile applications leveraging location based technology.