Interview with Siva Ravikumar, CEO, damaka

Please provide an introduction to your company.

At Damaka we are in multimedia collaboration business, the multi media communication side of it. We thought of it about two years back in the early part of 2003 and we had our prototype done soon. We launched our product in February 05 i.e. the commercial product. To give the whole perspective, we were actually developing a product in parallel to what Skype was building at that time. However we were not aware of Skype at that time and we were building this on our own. Our goal was to develop something for a peer-peer world because we realized that the world is going to move peer to peer.

When we define peer to peer it means the intelligence is residing at the edge, taking the server out of the picture. We wanted everything to be open standards based and not proprietary protocol based stuff. So that is why we adopted SIP.

How does your technology compare to that of Skype?

We are SIP based. Skype is not. We call our approach a personalized softswitch. That was the premise that we started with. People when downloading the application are actually downloading the actual Softswitch which has got call control, routing and everything in it. It is a new paradigm shift the way we are doing it. If one compares that approach to Skype, what we do is direct peering. We don’t hop onto the third party resources like the Skype does. We are true to peer to peer type in the sense.

Allowing people to make free calls is wonderful and sounds great to customer, but at the end of the day how do you earn money. What sort of revenue model does your company follow?

Like any internet business, you start with free stuff, and then get the traction going. Basically have the adoption for it. We have products for the enterprise as well. We are heavily focusing on enterprise actually. On the consumer side, we are going to launch the PC to phone service pretty soon as well.

With the acquisition of Skype for a whopping $ 2.4 billion dollars, acquisition of Dialpad by Yahoo, acquisition of Telio by Microsoft, the PC to PC VoIP seems hot at the moment. Is the market large enough to sustain all these players including yourself.

Market is in its prime right now and it will continue in this direction. If one does client-server stuff today, I am sorry to say that that they are looking backwards. Everything should be forward looking and you should be able to adapt. Half the problem with the large companies is that they have some sort of ego and they don’t want to transform to new technologies immediately. They play wait and watch game but eventually they have to catch with the whole game. There is no choice for them. One thing in respect to peer to peer infrastructure is that the costs are very marginal. So we can have a very competitive market.

Apart from Skype, who do you see as main players in the market.

Right now there is no other peer to peer other than the two of us.

What kind of IM capabilities do you have?

We have the most powerful IM capability right now. We have worldwide web search in the IM and we were the first one to integrate the spell check in it. We are the only ones who provide the “Class 5” features and we were the first one to provide music-on-hold, and features like call waiting.

Any specific features you can point at on the enterprise side?

On the enterprise side, we provide two deeper layers of security in comparison to what a consumer will get. Consumer is secure enough but the enterprise may not want to download the public version software. They have their own peer to peer networks and our primary goal is to empower every enterprise in the world with their own dedicated peer to peer network. We have never faced SPITt spam because our system is based on trusted relationships i.e we don’t let buddies in the market spam each other. We believe privacy has to be maintained.