On Friday evening as we settled down to dinner with our families on the east coast, looking forward to an autumnal weekend of raking leaves and frosty morning walks. Sangoma made an announcement of acquiring VoIP Innovations. Firstly, congratulations to David Walsh, Jason Tapolci, John Elliott, Evin Hunt, Natalie DeCario, Harold Vance, Joe Aponick, Hugh Goldstein, and the rest of the team VoIP Innovations team.

VoIP innovations was a wholesale VoIP provider focused on the North America market, selling to ITSP/MSP (Internet Telephony Service Providers / Managed Service Providers), call centers and enterprises. Their USP in my opinion is their management console that made it easy for their customers to deliver enterprise telephony services to businesses. Making it easy is important.

Now bear in mind VoIP Innovations is a telco, a CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier). Towards the end of 2017 they bought Apidaze to enable them to expand their offer beyond numbers, voice, and messaging, into programmable telecoms. Which means a vast array of value added services, as well as video through a WebRTC SDK. Telco and CPaaS are a bit like oil and water, but we’re seeing more of these deals work out, e.g. TeleSign and BICS.

The thing VoIP Innovations did differently to other CPaaS providers, and in its tradition, was to make it easy for its customers to offer and consume all the CPaaS-enabled services through a Showroom. At TADSummit 2018 David and Evin gave an excellent keynote showcasing their Showroom.

Now VoIP Innovations is part of Sangoma. Sangoma provides a broad range of enterprise communications products and services. Sangoma also runs the largest open source telecom community, Asterisk, and FreePBX. VoIP Innovations brings carrier services for North America, a CPaaS (programmability), and an interesting channel to market with its Showroom. I show the stack below.

Given Sangoma’s development skills and massive ecosystem, they can accelerate the adoption of Apidaze and the Showroom, and make its reach global. Currently, Apidaze includes FreeSWITCH, I wonder if they’ll migrate it over to Asterisk? Asterisk is used for CPaaS at scale in combination with other projects like OpenSIPS and Kamailio. From a geographic coverage perspective, they now have North America, but I wonder if more regional wholesale VoIP providers will be in Sangoma’s crosshairs?

Astricon (29-30 Oct in Atlanta) is going to be interesting given this acquisition. I’ll be covering this and more in my keynote, on ‘Show me the ‘UCing Money.’