Once a board-level supplier of signaling and media applications, NMS Communications introduced a range of off-the-shelf media servers this week and announced Ericsson as its first large customer.

NMS launched its Vision product line of servers a couple of months ago with the introduction of two video-based servers: a transcoder and a gateway. This week, the company extended its new product line with a text server, signaling server, VoiceXML and media servers.

Ericsson purchased NMS’ new media server for a product it will be introducing in the next couple of months.

Through its history as a component supplier to equipment makers, NMS learned the broad range of requirements for media servers and incorporated that knowledge into its stand-alone products.

“That’s why we released the servers as a family rather than a single device,” said David Asher, product manager of platform solutions at NMS.

It also learned that broaching the idea of creating their own product line that would compete with their customers was not initially well received. But that was three years ago.

“They saw it as a competitive move and that kept us out of the market as a commercial vendor,” Asher said. “But so much has changed in the market and our customers began giving us signals in the opposite direction. We think we have gotten the green light from the market.”

As for cannibalizing its component market, Asher said that would happen slowly and that when it did, it wasn’t necessarily bad for business since they would be replacing a lower-priced option with a higher-priced option that provided more value.

“Besides, the real pop in the media server market will be new applications,” Asher said.

NMS isn’t putting a dollar figure on its expectations for this market, but Asher said the move would be transformation for the company.

The new servers are compatible with session initiation protocol (SIP) and voice-over-IP and offers VoiceXML interface. They support SS7 and ISDN and are built on an open platform that allows users to customize their solutions. They also support any type of media, such as: speech, text, music, images and video.

In addition to the equipment makers and the telecom application developers it already serves with its OEM business model, the media servers will help NMS address system integrators and the broader development community as well as hosted VoIP providers.

The company expects to see its new servers used in various applications such as mobile and IP Centrex, multimedia messaging and blogging, call centers, conferencing and call processing.