Interview with Emerick Woods, CEO, GIPS

I guess the first major success GIPS had was Skype. You have been behind Skype which became a big phenomenon. You also have new startups like Nimbuzz as your customers. Who in your opinion has the right strategy in place to emerge as the next major player in consumer VoIP?

I think the competition now is not about emergence of another Skype. VoIP is being added as a capability to almost all the major messaging softclients out there. Most of them are GIPS customers. You also have VoIP integrated into the mobile handsets. If Skype is to see competition, it is likely to come from mobile VoIP companies.

How far has GIPS been able to leverage the success it had with Skype?

Skype was certainly the customer that put GIPS on the roadmap. That opened the doors for many of the deals that we did subsequently. Fortunately the reverse is not true. When we lost Skype as a customer we did not lose other deals. Over the last few quarters we have had some great wins such as Baidu.

I think media gateway wins would have been a bigger source of revenue for GIPS. Why is GIPS not targeting media gateway vendors? Is it because they tend to have their own voice processing solutions?

You have probably not come across our customer list. Out customers include companies like Cisco, Nortel and Avaya. You should assume that we will in the future move from pure P2P client implementations to gateway deployments. That is a logical conclusion to have and you can assume that we are going in that direction.
You are also going in the direction of video. What is your video strategy?

We intend to be one of the dominant players in real-time video communications over IP. Having said that, with video capability, we are targeting customers developing integrated multimedia communications solutions such as collaboration and conferencing solutions that incorporate video capabilities. We are unlikely to go into streaming.

Majority of your customers are offering services for free to consumers. Does that have implications for your revenue prospects?

Just because the bigger players out there are offering services for free does not mean that they are not making money. Their revenue models are usually based on advertising as you know. In fact one would argue that the more you give out the client for free, the more viral it becomes which translates into more revenues. Also, just because they give away the client for free does not mean they get the voice processing software from us for free.

Anything particular you are doing to solve call quality over 3g mobile and Wimax networks?

GIPS shines where there is network congestion and packet loss. Where we really made our mark was on narrowband networks where managing call quality is a nightmare. So in fact there is nothing special that we have to do in order to perform on wireless data networks. We already have customers like Samsung using our technology for VoIP over mobile data networks. Most mobile startups recognize that we excel in performance on data networks. So it is not so much about developing new capabilities. But there is some optimization that needs to be engineered around things like memory footprint etc.

You have 100 million end points out there using GIPS software. How do you break them down into mobile, ATA, and PCs?

I don’t have the exact figures. But I guess around 80% of those end points must be PC clients.

You changed your company name from Global IP Sound to Global IP Solutions? Any particular reason why?

The word ‘Sound’ conveys the impression that we are focussed on just the audio part. We have been targeting video as an important area going forward.

You also have hosted PBX platform capability. Was Toktumi supposed to be the launch customer and is it part of your product portfolio now?

We acquired a company named Crystal Voice a year ago. They offered Push-to-talk and PBX type solutions. We have since exited that space. We are not an applications company. It is unlikely that you will see us delivering apps. Toktumi uses its own branded solutions ‘sponsored’ by GIPS.