Sangoma Empowers Innovative Application Developers

Orecx is using the power of open source to develop a voice recording application that in their own words is "easy to install, use, and maintain, and develop an ongoing development platform that ensures a substantially lower cost structure than proprietary voice recorders".

By Greg Galitzine
Group Editorial Director

First appeared on May 27, 2008, on http://opensourcepbx.tmcnet.com

Sangoma Technologies (News - Alert) makes hardware cards, and software drivers and utilities designed to empower developers by allowing them to build a variety of applications using their building blocks.

Well regarded in the open source market, Sangoma works on a number of key platforms including Asterisk (News - Alert), FreeSwitch, CallWeaver, and Yate, which allows innovative developers to create exciting new applications.

Orecx (News - Alert) is one such innovative company that is using the power of open source to develop a voice recording application that in their own words is "easy to install, use, and maintain, and develop an ongoing development platform that ensures a substantially lower cost structure than proprietary voice recorders".

Their Oreka Total Recorder (TR) allows users to search, find and organize recordings based on time or date of call, incoming or outgoing phone number, or whatever metric the customer chooses. The solution supportsVoIP and is designed to integrate with any phone system. The solution leverages existing tools such as a standard Internet browser for accessing the calls and a standard media player for replaying calls.

Bruce Kaskey, co-founder at Orecx, spoke to TMCnet about the company.

"The founders of OrecX are all from the voice recording industry. Steve Kaiser (co-founder) has been in the voice recording industry since 1987. We wanted to come up with an innovative approach that would disrupt the traditionalTDM voice recording market. So Bruno Haas one of the co-founders suggested we go the open source route. In 2006 we posted oreka on sourceforge.net as a project for voice recording. Our mission was to allow anyone to have our code under the GPL license and build software that was easy to install, easy to use and most importantly inexpensive."

Kaskey continued, "Well this concept was foreign to us, and Steve and I were curious: 'how do you make money?' We knew the voice recording market, not open source, so then it dawned on us that you give away the software for free to all the people who want it, so they can make improvements to it. Then you take the improvements and add them to your commercial version and sell the support and the software to enterprises". This newfound understanding of the open source market has resulted in success for the company.

"We started selling our product in the middle of 2006, and we've made a lot of improvements to it, and developed some partnerships with some pretty strong players in the VoIP market", Kaskey said.

"We have over 100 customers around the world and over 4,500 lines being recorded by the commercial version of Orecx. We have 31,000 people that have downloaded our free version and many of them contribute to the improvements of the open source version."

Kaskey explained that many open source PBX users were struggling with adding voice recording to their servers. An inherent issue with open source PBX's (News - Alert) is how many calls can one server concurrently process. Since Oreka TR passively records network traffic it puts no strain on the PBX. This is why Asterisk style platform users have gravitated to Oreka TR.

"Our big advantage", he told TMCnet, "is our experience. Having been in the call recording industry, having sold NICE and having competed against large companies whose operating systems are proprietary, we understand the market. And, since we are software-based, we can deploy this anywhere in the world and have call center grade call recording up and going within an hour".

Orecx customers use a variety of development platforms, depending on their needs. As Kaskey said, "Many of our users choose Sangoma cards and are very happy with their performance".

"Our customers are technically sophisticated and they will pick and choose the setup they want."

Regarding the future, Kaskey believes that the opportunity is huge.

"More people are starting to see that they can do a lot with our voice recording solutions. Our goal is to make voice recording like voice mail easy to use and inexpensive."

Greg Galitzine (News - Alert) is editorial director of TMCnet. To read more of Greg's articles, please visit his columnist page. http://www.tmcnet.com