MEF Executive Questionnaire #24: Nick Jensen, Dialogic

MEF continues to seek new ways to profile its members and promote the thought-leadership of the senior executives within these companies. We are pleased to launch the MEF Executive Questionnaire to reveal the real people behind the industry in an informal and entertaining manner.

This will be a regular feature of the MEF blog, so make sure you subscribe via email or RSS. If you are a senior executive from one of our member companies and would like to be featured then please contact MEF Marketing Director, Stephen Jenkins.

The twenty fourth in the series is from Nick Jensen, CEO of Dialogic.

1. Please describe briefly your main company activities and your role within that organisation

Dialogic develops products and technologies for both the enterprise and service provider markets that enable reliable, seamless, and efficient communications and services across countless devices on a wide variety of networks. Our customers are service providers for our network infrastructure products and solutions companies that sell value-added services to the service providers for our “engine” products that enable services such as mobile radio, color ring back tones, video ring tones, and voice and video SMS. Today, networks using Dialogic technology carry more than fifteen billion minutes of traffic per month, and services built on Dialogic products are used by an estimated two billion mobile subscribers worldwide.

I am the Chairman and CEO at Dialogic. We are a diverse worldwide company, both in organization and in customer base, so I spend quite a bit of my time travelling the globe meeting our customers and employees. I love it!

2. Without necessarily revealing any confidential information, please outline the principal business models your company usesDialogic provides three different opportunities to go to market: through distributors/resellers, through Telecom Equipment Manufacturers and Integrated Systems Vendors, and direct to service providers. This gives Dialogic tremendous breadth and reach to the global market.

3. What has been your company’s greatest achievement to-date?Dialogic is a very innovative company, and we’ve enabled many industry “firsts” throughout the years, such as color ring back tones, background music, speech enablement, 3G video, and VoIP gateways, which I’m very proud of.

Additionally, over the last few months, we’ve had some very successful deployments in carrier networks. For instance, we launched our Mobile Backhaul solution that provides significant bandwidth and operating cost saving for mobile carriers – in fact it was trialed and endorsed by Telefonica. We also won what we believe to be the largest video gateway contract ever awarded. This contract is with Aircel in India, through Nokia Siemens Networks. Aircel will be using Dialogic’s Video Gateway for its 3G video calling platform to offer advanced mobile services.

4. What is your company currently working on that is going to move the industry forward?

5. What is exciting you most in 2011 (either personally or professionally)?I’m very excited by all the new and innovative mobile value added services that are being deployed on networks around the world, including location-based services, messaging services and mobile commerce services. And what’s equally exciting to me is that Dialogic is enabling these innovative value-added services with our media processing, gateway and signaling products.

6. What is the most important piece of technology in your life?Technology is everywhere in my life. Right now, I take my iPad everywhere. People think I sleep with it.

7. What mobile device(s) do you use?iPhone and iPad.

8. What’s your favourite application?I don’t have one favorite. I like Facetime, since it allows me to see my family when I’m travelling.

9. What’s your ringtone?I actually don’t use one. I make it sound like the old phone.

10. Which mobile industry blogs do you regularly read and why?I read quite a few blogs. One that I read a lot though is the VisionMobile blog, as it gives a balanced view of the world.

11. What is the biggest mobile content issue that is likely to affect the industry within the next 12 months?It’s predicted that global mobile data traffic will nearly double every year for the next five years, driven by an insatiable appetite for video data. As interest in video entertainment grows, so will the desire for high quality of experience (QoE), especially if a viewer is paying a premium for it or it is accompanied by advertising, since the advertiser wants to make the best impression possible. In addition, the ability to provide quality video on a wide range of end user devices and be context-aware will become increasingly important, whether the device is a large-screen HDTV, a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile phone. So one of the biggest issues that mobile operators will need to address is how to evaluate and track QoE, and subsequently, how to leverage QoE as a way to increase average revenue per user.

• We have had industry leading voice bandwidth optimization products for years and now we’ve incorporated data into these optimization schemes in our mobile backhaul product and are working on also incorporating video into these optimization schemes. This will help the entire industry ease the backhaul burden from all the smart devices as they enable more and more use of data and video, thus enabling even more use of the mobile networks!
• Video analytics software which would give the mobile video deliver ecosystem the ability to measure and verify end user quality of experience