At Dialogic, we recently launched the PowerMedia family of products, basically an umbrella term for all of our software-based media processing products.  If you’ve been working with Dialogic for a few years you might already be family with HMP (now PowerMedia HMP) or the IP Media Server (originally Snowshore), now going under the family name of PowerMedia IP Media Server.  Both branches of the family now have video as well as voice capability, and also both benefit from technologies provided by our own in-house brain trust, Dialogic Media Labs.

I wanted to talk about one particular new innovation, and that is PowerMedia Web Media Server (or WMS).  This is most closely related to IP Media Server, but the big change here is in the API that developers use to create their voice or video applications.  WMS extends a RESTful API, or in other words one using HTTP for a simple web-based app.  This is the same approach used by many web services today including Twitter, Salesforce and many others (see The Programmable Web for the astonishing and growing list of web APIs).  This style of API allows rapid creation of “mashup” apps that can talk to a number of different web-based services and combine them into a single application.

This is a departure for us, as our media servers have previously assumed a telephony-centric audience (and knowledge of “C” APIs or SIP for call control).  Moving more towards web services potentially allows a much wider developer base, and puts the tools into different hands.