Jasomi Networks

The concept for Jasomi was conceived in a meeting between Cullen Jennings and David A. Bryan, who introduced the concept to Dan Freedman, resulting in the founding of the corporation in 2001. Funded by the founders and early employee Benjamin Freedman, the company quickly created a demonstrable SBC, and began to market it as the PeerPoint product line at the Fall 2001 VON trade show organized by Jeff Pulver.

Strong early interest encouraged Freedman and Jennings to commit additional bootstrapping funds from themselves and friends and family. An R&D center was established in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in early 2002, and Alan Hawrylyshen joined the team. 2002 was spent turning the early demonstrator into a more full featured and supportable product. Ryan Kereliuk and Johnson Wu joined the company in mid-2002, and in late 2002, Jasomi adopted a hybrid coopetition model of software development, keeping certain advancements proprietary while releasing others to the public through the reSIProcate open-source SIP stack. David A. Bryan left the company and Alan Hawrylyshen became CTO in late 2002.

Between 2002 and 2004, the company advanced the state of the art in SBC technology, providing customers for the first time with the ability to perform VoIP through existing NAT-enabled firewalls so that residential subscribers could be supported without placing any hardware on their premises. An early customer making great use of this facility was Jeff Pulver's Free World Dialup, which provided free calling services worldwide amongst its subscribers using the SIP VoIP protocol.

In 2005, the company was acquired by Ditech Communications (itself later acquired by Nuance Communications) in a deal valued at $20 million.

A combination of Jasomi's technical successes together with its small size and small amount of raised capital resulted in the company becoming attractive to a number of potential acquirers and investors by early 2005. Ultimately, the company sold to Ditech Communications (now itself acquired by Nuance Communications), a US public company based in Silicon Valley in mid-2005 in a deal valued at $24.55M. The acquisition brought benefit to Jasomi's investors and employees, and gave Ditech a credible toehold in the VoIP marketplace. Jasomi's then-CEO, Todd Simpson, went on to become Ditech's CEO a year later.

While the size of the acquisition was well into 8 digits, the returns to investors (many of whom were employees) were at a comparable percentage to those of the largest company in the SBC arena, Acme Packet. The top three pure-play companies in the SBC space at that time, Acme Packet, Kagoor Networks, and Jasomi, have all provided positive returns to their stakeholders. However, many others in the SBC space have not, and several companies succumbed to pressures of the market.

Ultimately, as was the case with several other acquired SBC companies, the attempts to integrate Jasomi's product lines into those of its acquirer were not successful. Ditech continued to market Jasomi's PeerPoint SBC platform, but while under the leadership of CEO Tim Montgomery, neglected to invest in its technical or market development. In the first two years after acquisition, a number of key employees resigned. Ditech closed its Canadian subsidiary in September 2007, terminating most of the remaining Jasomi employees. However, Todd Simpson, Jasomi's CEO from late 2004 through its acquisition, ultimately became CEO of Ditech following Tim Montgomery's departure.