Aculab
Aculab is a privately held, UK-based limited company that was founded in 1978. With headquarters and R&D facilities located in Milton Keynes, UK, and its branch office is in Norwood, Massachusetts, US.
Ladan Baghai-Ravary is the company CEO.
It is a designer, developer and manufacturer that specialises in providing API-driven, enabling technology sub-systems for telecommunications related OEM products such as are used in fixed line PSTN, wireless and VoIP networks. Its products are sold worldwide, primarily through direct sales and also via the reseller channel.
Company history
In 1978, Aculab was a design consultancy involved in the music industry. Soon after the first microprocessors were introduced, it began to design and manufacture intelligent interfaces and controllers for computer peripherals. In 1988, Aculab turned to building analogue speech processing sub-systems for a number of clients, such as British Telecom.In 1991, Aculab began to ship the first E1 interface cards for the UK and German markets. These PC Industry Standard Architecture form factor cards enabled PC-based speech processing products to be connected to digital public switched telephone network networks. The expansion of its product capabilities to include the physical interfaces and telecommunications protocols, channel-associated signaling and Signaling System 7 ) needed to reach a broader, worldwide market, helped to establish Aculab as one of the pioneers of the computer telephony industry.
Later, in 1997, Aculab introduced its own ISA speech processing board, the first of its portfolio of digital signal processor -based voice boards. And it was in 1998 that Aculab introduced a Peripheral Component Interconnect product, the first combined trunk card and voice board – Prosody PCI. It was novel for its time, delivering up to 240 speech channels and 4 E1/T1 trunk interfaces on a single card at a time when the standard was 24 to 30 channels. A Prosody cPCI version followed in 2000.
During 1993, Aculab introduced Groomer, a protocol converter that enabled interconnection between disparate telephone networks running incompatible protocols. In 2002, the product was relaunched as GroomerII, a signalling and media gateway that can be used for connection between equipment and applications deployed in time-division multiplexing and Internet Protocol networks. Aculab's GIII gateway is the third generation evolution in the product line.
In 2003, Aculab introduced Prosody S, a host media processing alternative to traditional, DSP-based voice boards, for IP-based OEM products. In 2011, four years after launching the ApplianX range of gateways, it launched Aculab Cloud - a cloud-based telephony API service platform.
In December 2024, the firm was acquired by the British subsidiary controlled by Enghouse Systems.