History
The company was incorporated in June 1998 through the merger of ATC Group, LLC and Diversified Technologies Inc. (a public company on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board). Both companies were initially formed to develop, manufacture and market a line of communications access products and upon merging, the name was changed to TEK DigiTel Corporation and $1.0 million was raised to assist with the first phase of product development. The Company is headquartered in Germantown, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C.

Management
TEK DigiTel is headed by a management team with extensive related experience gained at leading manufacturers and Service Providers including Motorola, 3Com, IBM, Nortel Networks, Rockwell, Hughes, MCI Worldcom, Bell Atlantic, Bell Canada, BellSouth, and GTE. This includes extensive Design/Manufacturing experience as well as the Sales and Marketing expertise to launch and support products in this market.

The TEK DigiTel management team members have an extensive background in the WAN (Wide Area Networking) arena after having spent many years developing and marketing products for transporting voice and data traffic over circuit and packet networks. Involvement in this market from its infancy and in particular, experience in producing low cost access devices gives them a unique set of skills not found in those who have focused on the large carrier switch/gateway environment.

Customers
While TEK DigiTel’s ultimate customers will be millions of small and medium business owners, the V-Server products will normally reach these customers via Service Providers under a rental agreement or bundled with their service offerings. For this reason, TEK DigiTel is focused on delivering value to both parties with its products and service offerings:

• For the small/medium sized business user, the solution focus is to deliver sophisticated voice and data solutions matching that found in a much larger organization while minimizing both the company’s technology acquisition and ongoing voice and data carrier costs. All this is combined with ease-of-use functionality that recognizes the customer’s lack of knowledge and/or resources to configure, use and maintain a complex solution.
  

• For the Service Provider, the focus is on enabling the delivery of profitable IP (Internet Protocol) based communication services to their customers over their managed IP infrastructure. A special emphasis is put on ease of installation and reduced infrastructure costs to ensure profitability of new offerings. As well, ease-of-use features ensure that the new sophisticated voice/data services gain customer acceptance.

In addition to dealing directly with Service Providers, TEK DigiTel is forming partnerships with other equipment providers with technology transfer agreements that will see TEK DigiTel technology incorporated in those vendors product sets and elements of those vendor’s functionality being bundled into TEK DigiTel’s offerings. Potential partners include:

• PBX (Private Branch Exchange) vendors with an interest in providing cost effective solutions to customers with a smaller number of subscribers than their products would normally address.
  

• VoIP Gateway manufacturers looking to include lower cost CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) Gateways to compliment their Central Office (CO) based solutions.
  

• Cable Modem, ISDN and DSL (Digital Subscriber Loop) equipment manufacturers looking to move from simple modems to offering higher margin Integrated Access Device (IAD) solutions.
  

• Conventional Analog/Digital termination suppliers (ie. Modems, DSU/CSUs) who would like to provide more sophisticated access solutions to their existing carrier customers.
  

• Small Business/SOHO solution providers looking to expand their offerings from conventional hub/switch/modem devices to offer routing, VoIP and PBX functionality to their customer base.

Strategy
Many equipment vendors see a world where today’s circuit switched voice network is completely displaced the new VoIP managed IP networks planned by a new generation of Service Providers. TEK DigiTel’s strategy takes a realistic view and believes that conventional circuit switched telephony will continue to exist for a long time with VoIP services slowly displacing conventional voice traffic. The normal hesitation of users to migrate to something new, conventional network cost decreases brought on by competitive pressures, initial lack of VoIP managed network capacity/availability and the fact that customers will always need to make local calls will all contribute to maintaining some level of traffic on traditional phone services.

In the same vein, TEK DigiTel believes that the new reduced cost managed IP network voice offerings will have to compete with toll free "Voice over the Internet" telephony. While not able to consistently provide toll quality voice, it will be able to guarantee a "cellular" quality of service that has already proven acceptable for a large percentage of business calls in today’s environment.

By embracing the potential of this hybrid voice environment rather than picking one transport mechanism over the others, TEK DigiTel is working to provide customers with the ability to access all transparently allowing Service Providers to include a combination of VoIP offerings in sophisticated calling packages similar to those found today in the conventional telephony and cellular world. The ability to provision a "Friends and Family" like service enabling the customer a certain degree of free or flat rate calling as a lure to capturing the lucrative long distance managed voice revenues is a key benefit of TEK DigiTel’s products. In addition, the customer migration to VoIP services is hastened by the transparent ease-of-use that only a CPE device can offer, essentially eliminating the complexity found in VoIP two-stage dialing mechanisms. 

Products
The first in a series of V-Server offerings, the iGATE combines a low cost IP access router with a VoIP gateway and the WAN interfaces to allow customers to integrate both voice and data traffic over a single link. The V-Server iGATE replaces the traditional data router, normally installed by the Service Provider in customer sites that require Internet connection for multiple Personal Computers (PCs). By attaching to the Ethernet LAN (Local Area Network) that connects these computers, each can access remote Internet based services by using the IP routing capabilities of the V-Server device.

Unlike conventional Internet Access Routers, the V-Server iGATE also provides analog voice ports that can be connected to existing phones, PBXs, Key Systems, and/or analog phone lines from the local phone company. The voice ports enable voice conversations and fax transmissions from conventional telephony devices to be transported over any IP based network including the Internet and/or the Service Provider’s managed IP network. These VoIP based calls can be provided for a fraction of the cost of conventional PSTN calls allowing Service Providers to offer greatly reduced prices to their customers. As well as converting the voice/fax traffic to a form acceptable for transport over these networks, the V-Server iGATE devices incorporate sophisticated call routing mechanisms that allow the caller to select the grade of carrier service used to route the call. The user can manually or automatically select from: A) Free "cellular", B) Low cost "near toll" quality and/or C) Higher cost conventional "toll" quality circuit switched voice. This call-by-call selection allows the small/medium business owner to control costs and/or increase connectivity with their customers.

The V-Server iGATE can be used alone providing a complete solution in ISDN environments or with third party analog, cable and/or xDSL modems. It can operate as both the router and VoIP gateway or when configured in "Gateway only" mode can provide Voice/Fax connectivity between any Ethernet LAN connected sites. The V-Server products utilize H.323 and other standards based mechanisms for establishing connections and transporting voice traffic ensuring interoperability with third party gateways and/or PC based telephony clients like Microsoft’s NetMeeting 3.0.

The V-Server iGATE is only the first in a series of platforms planned by TEK DigiTel with V-Server offerings expanded in late 1999 to include increased voice port densities along with enhanced voice support (ie. Call Transfer, Call Forward, Conferencing, Interactive Voice Response, Unified Messaging, etc.) which will enable the device to eliminate the need for a PBX at small locations. In addition, expanded connectivity options are planned for the product line to support enhancements in Cable Modem, Wireless and xDSL technologies.

Services
As well as traditional product support services, TEK DigiTel is taking the lead in driving the deployment of packet voice services by bundling services designed to ease some of the concerns expressed by Service Providers planning to deliver Voice over IP offerings. TEK DigiTel’s VoiceServer.net Internet Telephony Portal is designed to allow Service Providers deploying V-Server Gateways to include a component of free Internet Voice calling with their service without incurring the infrastructure costs associated with these "Non-revenue generating" calls. By offloading the GateKeeper processing for these calls to the VoiceServer.net portal, providers can focus their efforts on the revenue generating calls and reduce their GateKeeper and Billing System cost and complexity. Ultimately this will drive a tighter relationship between their infrastructure costs and the incoming revenue needed to fund growth. In addition, during the planning phase the removal of the "free call" variable costs will allow a more predictable business-case analysis.

Partnerships
TEK DigiTel recognizes that the speed of Internet technology advancement mandates partnerships with other industry players as a vehicle to stay ahead of the market curve. The ability of the company’s management to form and maintain these partnerships differentiates TEK DigiTel from those organizations that do not have a firm understanding of the "time to market" issues of this industry. As well as the OEM and customer relationships described above, development partnerships with companies that specialize in key areas of Internet Telephony technology, provide TEK DigiTel with access to advanced and tested elements required in the V-Server products and ensures that new developments and standards can be quickly implemented. Current partnerships include Telogy Networks for advanced VoIP coders and Fax software support, RADVision for their H.323 call setup implementation and CentrePoint Technologies for advanced voice handling hardware/software. As the V-Server product evolves to incorporate additional functions required by the small/medium business owner, it is anticipated that more partnerships will be added.

Competition
While the "Voice over Packet" and specifically the VoIP market is crowded with many participants, it is important to understand that a vast majority of these are focused on delivering products that simply emulate the conventional technologies in use today, but have been adjusted to utilize VoIP technology. The belief that the VoIP technology simply offers an opportunity to displace the incumbent supplier’s products with a new "VoIP-based" solution is a short term strategy that does not recognize the dramatic potential for change enabled by merging the Internet with the PSTN (Public Switched Telephony Network). TEK DigiTel is focused on delivering solutions that reflect the true potential of the new voice and data communication network architecture, providing those innovative Service Providers, who see this new world, with the tools to deliver their vision to their customers.

In addition, the many small/medium sized businesses, spawned by the Internet itself, are at a loss to find the solutions they require in the conventional telephony world. Sophisticated telephony equipment and service offerings have always been available to the large enterprise customer. While most next generation PBX developers are simply providing these same large companies with newer IP based alternatives, only TEK DigiTel is focusing on the needs of the small to medium customer. By working with Service Providers to incorporate a sophisticated communications hub in their service offerings and leveraging the strategy of printer companies who transformed the document processing capabilities of small/medium sized businesses via the introduction of multifunction technology (ie. printer, fax machine, scanner, photocopier, etc.), TEK DigiTel will deliver customer solutions rather than simply "boxes". Understanding the needs of the small to medium customer and implementing products that allow Service Providers to address them is ultimately TEK DigiTel’s key strength. 

Summary
Since TEK DigiTel's first shipment of its introductory product in May, 1999, commercial interest has been significant.  Potential customers including Service Providers, Gateway manufacturers, and other technology modems (like cable or xDSL) have embraced the possibility of capturing a share of the fast growing marketplace for IP Telephony without making huge investments or changes to their existing networks.  At this early stage in the market's growth, TEK is one of a very small circle of competitors, although the marketplace will inevitably attract much more competition as it continues to grow.  Because of the limited window in achieving "first to market" status and the positive product reception to date, TEK DigiTel will aggressively pursue new market opportunities over the coming year.

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