Media Server Scalability in the Spotlight for UC and Apps

By Peter Bernstein
Senior Editor

Many decades ago the late Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan stoked the technology world’s imagination with his infamous 1964 observation that “The Medium is the Message.”  All these years later, the phrase remains relevant. In many ways, given all of the innovation since, it may be even timelier today.

Today’s reality, and what will grow more important as interactions become more enriched/immersive/contextual, is the primacy of the medium as message.  It is what we now call the customer experience.  And, while much attention is paid to those experiences, the infrastructure supporting deserves attention as it too transforms.  Think of this as the media as messenger.  

This very point was highlighted recently at ITEXPO Anaheim where TMC (News - Alert) Group Editorial Director Erik Linask conducted an interview with Alan Percy, Senior Director Product Marketing at Dialogic. The two discussed Dialogic’s plan to address the need for the underlying communications infrastructure to scale to meet the explosive needs of the always on/all ways connected, increasingly all-IP world. 

Linask and Percy delved into Dialogic’s (News - Alert) recent release of its PowerMedia XMS 3.0 software—a major upgrade of the company’s highly-scalable software media server/media resource function (MRF). Percy noted that a key addition in the XMS 3.0 was a scaling option. The latest release has software that Percy describes, “As a traffic cop. It is like a load balancer distributing traffic between multiple media servers.  Each media server can handle up to 200 sessions and that puts us up to 30,000 sessions. That is great for new growth applications and it provides much needed resilience.”

He added that, “The idea for the media service platform is to be part of a service creation and delivery platform.”    The context for making the infrastructure more agile and scalable is that communication service providers (CSPs) are attracting application developers who can use common scripting languages to rapidly develop communications-enabled apps that need CSP (News - Alert) infrastructure—media servers and entire service execution and billing platforms— that enable large scale monetization for the entire ecosystem.   

Percy noted that this type of capability to work with CSPs is attractive, as Dialogic’s recent deal with XO Communications (News - Alert) highlights.  He also said that it is very exciting as it opens up logical partnerships with “best of breed” partners up and down the value chain, including the likes of Oracle (News - Alert) and IBM. 

Check out that full interview below: