It’s that time of the year again. The night falls earlier, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, and the weather is cooler. As we approach the holiday season — and 2019 looms large on the horizon — our thoughts naturally turn to the past year.
And for us at AudioCodes, what a year it was! From sold-out events to exciting new products and big wins, who would have thought that so much could be packed into just one year? So, let’s kick back with a drink in hand, put our feet up, and remember just some of the things that happened at AudioCodes during 2018.
First up, we were very busy with events. We started the year with an event of our own, AudioCodes Accelerate, where we were honored to host around 200 representatives of top-tier partners, businesses and service providers from the EMEA, North and South America, and APAC regions. After that, we hit the road to showcase our wide range of voice solutions at some of the industry’s biggest conventions, including Microsoft Ignite, Enterprise Connect, Genesys CX18, Microsoft Future Decoded, CEBIT, Medica and UC Expo.
Speaking of voice solutions, we were pleased to announce in March that our One Voice for Microsoft 365 suite now offers native Microsoft Teams products and capabilities. This includes the C450HD native Teams IP phone, direct routing support on our Mediant session border controller (SBC) family and User Management Pack™ 365 for full lifecycle management across Teams deployments. In addition, SmartTAP 360° now supports compliance recording for PSTN with Microsoft Teams direct routing.
2018 also saw the release of AudioCodes’ new Mediant Cloud Edition (CE), providing full elasticity for building highly scalable and cost-effective SBCs in virtualized cloud environments. Based on the same code base as the other members of our Mediant SBC family, the Mediant CE supports broad SIP interoperability, powerful media handling capabilities (including transcoding) and robust security mechanisms.
During 2018, our all-IP initiatives started to kick in. Several design wins moved into production, including at Verizon and Telecom Italy. In addition, we released our 4G-enabled CPE. This extended our reach with service providers by making it possible for them to offer 4G/LTE access technology.
In the contact center arena, we introduced WebRTC for agents’ phones and to enable customer click-to-call functionality directly from enterprise websites, including mobile devices. WebRTC cuts PSTN charges while significantly improving the customer experience. It also increases the viability of the work at home agent (WAHA) model by reducing network voice impairments.
The year started off with a bang for our Voice.AI business unit, with the announcement on its official launch being made in January. The Voice.AI business unit harnesses and leverages our vast telephony and voice networking infrastructure to get AI-driven, actionable insights into enterprise voice data, and provides advanced Voice.AI solutions around them. During 2018, an improved state-of-the-art ASR AI engine with deep neural network-based architecture was launched, offering our enterprise customer base even higher accuracy rates and outstanding voice recognition performance. Our Voice.AI solutions, including Voca as well as SmartTAP 360o, further expanded their reach and install base across multiple global territories, with an even stronger, richer feature set.
And last but not least, AudioCodes’ determination to continually innovate and create the best advanced VoIP networking solutions out there paid off with some exciting business wins. 2018 saw us teaming up with key industry players, including Fuze, Time2Market, TetraVX, Telenet, VodafoneZiggo and Arkadin.
As you can see, 2018 has been quite a journey. The AudioCodes blog will be taking a short break over the holiday season, and we look forward to welcoming you — our loyal readers — back bright and early in 2019. Join us in raising a glass to a happy and prosperous new year. Cheers!
