SIP Print: The 'Wal-Mart' of VoIP Recording

Company: SIP

Headquarters: West Lake Village, Calif.

Technology Sector: Networking

Key Product: SIP Print VoIP call recording

Year Founded: 2008

Number of Channel Partners: Building distribution network now

Ideal Channel Partner: SMB-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: SIP Print's product line provides call recording for SIP-based VoIP deployments, helping customers meet stringent compliance requirements.

The Lowdown: With its recording appliance for VoIP calls, SIP Print touches two of the hottest technology growth areas -- voice and storage -- in an economy where many other product categories are suffering.

That's paying off in rapid growth for a company that only opened its doors a year ago and formally launched its pure Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) call-recording product in late 2008, said CEO and Co-founder Don Palmer.

SIP Print touts its eponymous voice recording appliance, developed by Palmer's co-founder and CTO Jonathan Fuld on a 1U server platform, as enterprise-level technology that's priced for the small and midsize business customer.

"About 95 percent of our business is with SMBs," Palmer said. "The sweet spot for us is 10 to 40 licenses. Most call recording platforms have been very, very expensive because most vendors have geared themselves for the enterprise space. They've tried to come down for the medium market, but they're still too expensive."

How dialed in to an emerging market for voice recording is SIP Print? Palmer is not shy in making pretty ambitious comparisons.

"We're the Wal-Mart of voice recording. Nobody even comes close to our prices," he said.

Palmer attributes the growth of SIP call recording to a pair of factors -- increased regulatory requirements to record all correspondence, especially in financial services, and the cost-effectiveness of transitioning from analog to digital recording.

From regulatory frameworks like Sarbanes-Oxley in the U.S. to the United Kingdom's Financial Services Authority call-recording requirements, a perfect storm of opportunity for SIP technology is in the offing, according to Palmer. He believes SIP Print is poised to take in $2 million for 2009, and could double that in 2010.

And the company plans to do it solely through its distribution channel, Palmer said. SIP Print is working with several smaller distributors and is in negotiations with a company to serve as a master distributor in North America, which Palmer couldn't name.

"It's very good product, even in the down economy," he said. "The bottom line is, and this is something Microsoft is saying, just like the written word is a matter of record and e-mails are admissible in court, so will the phone call be a matter of record, because both sit on the network. And this is going to be drilled down to even an office with just 20 people.

"We're compliant CALEA [the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act], so we can record pure SIP trunks. And look, our product comes with so much storage, you could literally take a phone off the hook and leave it there for five years and it would record it."