“With the introduction of our Network Fuel™ approach, we believe that the Dialogic of today has again captured the spirit of innovation at Dialogic.”

Kevin Cook is Dialogic’s President and CEO. Kevin stepped into this leadership role in August 2012 and has been with Dialogic since late 2008, serving in various executive management positions, including chief operating officer and executive vice president of Worldwide Field Operations. Before Dialogic, Kevin served as Vice President, North America at Avaya Inc., where he directed a 1700-person organization that spanned sales, services, and field marketing functions.

Kevin is steering Dialogic (Nasdaq:DLGC), known as the Network Fuel™ company, to inspire the world’s leading service providers and application developers to elevate the performance of media-rich communications across the most advanced networks. They boost the reliability of any-to-any network connections, supercharge the impact of applications and amplify the capacity of congested networks. Forty-eight of the world’s top 50 mobile operators and nearly 3,000 application developers rely on Dialogic to redefine the possible and exceed user expectations.

MO: What are some ways that Dialogic works to redefine the possible and exceed user expectations?

Kevin: Inspired by Network Fuel, we believe that Dialogic can deliver tremendous value to its customers. We identify and solve the most difficult challenges required to connect even a single network to the far greater global network. We enable our customers to build billion-dollar IP networks, but leverage their sunk cost in connecting legacy platforms such as voice mail. We supercharge our customer’s networks to avoid the pitfalls of network congestion as they ramp video and data services at a dizzying rate. We enable our customers to capture the benefits of software virtualization and the cloud even in a world in which service provider solutions have for so long been hardware and premise-based .

MO: Can you elaborate on how you create tremendous value for your customers and partners?

Kevin: Here are three dramatic examples of how Dialogic creates value for our customers and partners:

A leading global IP contact center provider, competing for an opportunity to provide a suite of customer care solutions to service a mobile network operator’s 40 million mobile subscribers, needed a connectivity solution that could bridge legacy terrestrial and mobile voice networks, next-generation IP networks and 3G mobile networks across 18 deployment sites. Dialogic delivered a fully-integrated, resilient and redundant any-to-any connectivity solution they needed to win the business and make the deployment a success. Lots of value creation there.

Dialogic, in partnership with one of the world’s largest software vendors, is actively deploying a service creation and delivery platform with a major voice, broadband and wireless carrier in North America for toll-free Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications to answer customer inquiries for thousands of businesses and other organizations across the region. Dialogic enabled the solution set with rich, media-mixing software that is Telco hardened and scalable. This solution set enables the carrier to migrate from dedicated hardware to cloud computing infrastructure, thus lower their operating costs and improving their competitiveness in the market. Clearly we are creating tremendous value for both our software vendor partner and the carrier in this opportunity.

And finally, a leading global conference and collaboration service provider with an extensive (and expensive) leased global MPLS network found its VoIP backhaul capacity stretched to the limit. Faced with costly leasing options for more MPLS bandwidth to alleviate their network congestion, they turned to Dialogic for an alternative solution. They have successfully piloted a drop-in solution from Dialogic which is proving to increase the VoIP backhaul capacity by more than double, which will alleviate their network congestion problem, provide overhead for more growth on the current network, and has a projected ROI of less than nine months. This delivers tremendous value to service providers battling network congestion.

MO: How has Dialogic evolved since first launching back in 1984?

Kevin: Dialogic began as a market innovator, literally inventing the key components of the computer telephony marketplace. This innovation has been the company’s hallmark for decades and the first thing people consider when talking about Dialogic. With the introduction of our Network Fuel™ approach, we believe that the Dialogic of today has again captured the spirit of innovation at Dialogic. While we have a broader portfolio, and one that favors service provider infrastructure, we still believe that Dialogic technology can elevate the performance of any advanced network and supercharge the services that are being offered. We have certainly had to adapt to this shift in the customer base and to the ever-changing needs of our customers and the complexity of technologies in the network. Regardless, the Dialogic that has emerged is stronger than ever and well-positioned to deliver value for its customers.

MO: I know that you’re extremely proud of the top-notch executive team you’ve built and their ability to attract impressive talent to help us execute on our corporate strategy. What tips or insights can you offer when it comes to attracting and putting together the best possible team?

Kevin: I have always believed that good talent begets good talent. We have a great team at Dialogic and those experiences, skills and enthusiasm come through to new candidates. I also believe in a “delegate, but inspect” management philosophy, so key executives feel the ability to put their stamp on things while being constructively coached to remain on strategy. In general, I look for people who aspire to create impact, to put the best team on the field and to never stop learning.

MO: What are some trends that you’re excited about or think that our readers should be paying attention to?

Kevin: There is one major trend that is definitely worth watching. The first is Web real-time communication, or WebRTC. Championed by Google and Mozilla, this technology allows any two WebRTC-enabled browsers to establish a video call with no other infrastructure required. All you need is a browser and an Internet connection. While WebRTC will establish the connection, we believe that the surround for services such as video mail, conferencing and collaboration will power an entire new set of carrier services and innovative applications.

MO: How is the Dialogic team preparing for your next wave of growth?

Kevin: Dialogic has reorganized its business around five key market segments that align with some of the largest growth drivers in the telecom market. This solution-oriented approach ensures that product management, marketing and sales are focused on the same customer opportunities but still remain open minded from an “outside-in perspective” to allow customer feedback that drives improvements in our product capabilities. For example, our Any-to-Any market segment is aimed at connecting disparate networks, covering innovations in IP soft-switches and session border controllers. Our application enablement segment captures Dialogic’s leadership with Web real-time communication, or WebRTC, a major industry catalyst for browser to browser communications.