The Year Ahead - with Sangoma's Jeff Dworkin

TMCnet recently asked some of the leading lights in the industry for their thoughts about 2011 and what’s in store for the year ahead.

Here’s what Jeff Dworkin, director of Marketing at Sangoma Technologies (News - Alert), had to say.

What was your company’s greatest achievement in 2011?

Dworkin: 2011 was truly a year of re-invention for Sangoma. Our new CEO, Bill Wignall, and our completely re-built executive management team have clearly established an entirely new strategic direction for the company. Even with an industry-wide reputation for some of the highest quality products available on the market, Sangoma’s evolution as a company had slowed, and we had experienced flat sales for a couple of years.

The new leadership team has re-ignited the growth engine, and we are 100 percent focused on delivering more value to our customers and to our distribution partners around the world. We have already begun to see results. In just our first three quarters together as an executive team under Bill’s leadership, our quarterly sales are already up 30 percent. We have dramatically expanded our product roadmap, launched aggressive new marketing programs, and hired key new sales executives in all the global regions closer to our customers. We also acquired VegaStream, expanding our addressable market beyond our traditional telephony interface boards into gateway appliances. 

What are your business’s goals for 2012?

Dworkin: Based on what we achieved in 2011, we are truly in a position to deliver on our goal of revenue growth and market expansion in 2012. One of the most important corporate goals for Sangoma will be to deliver on the release dates for all the new products in our pipeline. We will ship 10+ entirely new products in 2012, up from one per year historically for Sangoma, and much of our growth depends upon smoothly executing this plan in our R&D groups. I can’t really disclose the specific details of that product roadmap for competitive reasons, but I can tell you that when we announced this plan at our Partner Summit a couple of months ago, our partners around the world were exceptionally impressed. We got comments like “Well, that’s clearly not the same old Sangoma” and “If you pull off that plan, you’ll clearly be in an industry leadership position”. In addition, we plan to continue our growth both organically and through further M&A activity.

How would you describe your outlook for business and the economy at large heading into 2012?

Dworkin: Since our key corporate objective in 2012 is expansion, one of our resulting goals is to build our business in key international markets that are growing faster than the West and are less susceptible (though admittedly not immune) to the economic chaos we see in the world today. As a result, we see nothing but opportunity in front of us. Further, in the geographies of Europe and the U.S. that are under economic pressure, many of Sangoma’s products (and the applications created by our partners from these products) offer increases in productivity and reductions in operational cost. Therefore, we expect to see additional usage of these products in those parts of the world as participants in those economies work to squeeze the most from their investments.

If there’s one thing you’d like to see happen related to business in the year ahead, what is that one thing?

Dworkin: Resolving the uncertainty in many of the world’s economies would be a great help for all of us. Developing a strategy and a tactical plan to succeed in any economy (being growing, flat or shrinking) is something that good boards of directors should ask of any management team in times like these, and although not easy, it is achievable. However, having to be prepared for any contingency because of these very significant economic problems and uncertainty puts extra stress on every company, so seeing some of those issues get resolved successfully would be most welcome. One thing that is clear: The weak companies may not survive.

If 2011 was the year of cloud and/or the year of the tablet, what do you think 2012 will be known as?

Dworkin: Sangoma doesn’t  really focus on what the next single big thing will be. Our strategy involves selecting multiple product categories that target many of the key trends in the technology industry, so you’ll see us launch products that make use of the cloud and of social networking, as just two examples. But if Sangoma had to prognosticate on the year ahead, we’d say that perhaps 2012 will not be a year where we see a single revolutionary new technology (like tablets for instance), but rather, it might be a year of integration and uptake.

We feel this way due to the fact that several new technologies have really just emerged recently (such as those mentioned above), and because of the economic climate. When much financial uncertainty exists, companies and network operators tend to focus more on adopting efficiency improvements rather than on revolutionary technologies. So offerings like SIP and VoIP will get more fully integrated into the fabric of business communications.

Every business, from the SOHO through the international enterprise will only be talking about when they will move to these technologies, not if. Newer offerings like cloud and tablet usage will move out of the innovations, pilot and early adopters phase and move more into the mainstream of regular business operations. We fully expect Sangoma to benefit from those trends.

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