Unlike many company founders who take the first possible exit upon acquisition by a larger player, Scott Petrack has stuck around since Alcatel made its $27 million acquisition of conferencing and collaboration server vendor eDial. Petrack recently spoke with Telephony's Vince Vittore about the acquisition, future developments of presence management and his vision.

On the acquisition by Alcatel: eDial was bought for two reasons: conferencing and collaboration products, and the other reason was our core technology of IM SIP-based servers. I also think it choose eDial because of our model. Alcatel is very much about user-centric broadband. The eDial sales force also has been retained, and they're acting as an overlay for Alcatel's sales channel.

On the benefits to eDial: eDial by itself was not really able to go into the very largest carriers. We're only six months into this. In carrier time, that's a very short time. We believe there's a double revolution in conferencing and collaboration. You have to ask yourself why would carriers want to resell Webex when they can sell their own brand? The reason was there wasn't any equipment available to do that. We think Alcatel now has a superior product, though.

On new pressures: We essentially have our own P&L responsibility but definitely inside Alcatel, eDial is viewed as the local experts. Now that we're inside Alcatel, though, it's not enough to just come up with something new. You actually have to sell stuff. There are some very innovative rollouts of collaboration and conferencing. I think it would be pretty darn innovative if we convince carriers to offer conferencing and collaboration as part of their own package.

On contextual presence: I think it's progressed a great deal. One of eDial's core servers is called the advance communications server. Tellme is doing some pretty cool stuff. You can call that contextual. Right now the market seems to be falling into place. You don't want a separate product. You want to integrate it.

On vision: We're more anti-visionary. I think collaboration where you share desktops is very important. But what percentage of phone calls do you really want to see the other person and share your desktop? The original phone network was voice over real-time messaging. It was telegraph. The core of the phone network is about voice and messaging. Here we are in 2005 and SMS and IM are the logical inheritors of that.

E-mail Vince Vittore at vvittore@primediabusiness.com.