Dan Roberge:
Antoine, how are you?
Antoine Karachekhlian:
Alright, how are you doing?
Dan Roberge:
I'm good. So we talked yesterday, and you were telling me about your company and what you do, and I was really interested, and I thought we should talk further. So what do you guys do?
Antoine Karachekhlian:
So I work for a company. Actually, the division I work for is called Snom Americas, or Snom. However, the parent company's called VTech. I think a lot of people know who VTech is, I'm not sure. So they have three divisions. They have one division that does contract manufacturing. They own factories in China, Malaysia, Mexico and Germany. The parent company, which is VTech Holdings, is based out of Hong Kong, trading at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. So that's one of their divisions. They have another division which is more familiar to a lot of the audience here. Leapfrog. They make educational toys. So either the VTech Educational toys or Leapfrog is another brand that they manufacture.
Dan Roberge:
Yeah, and I've seen some of the VTech stuff at Walmart and Costco I think.
Antoine Karachekhlian:
All the retailers Best Buy, Walmart, Toy R Us in Canada and not in the US. Amazon's a big seller also. Then there's a third division which is telecom, and telecom is sort of subdivided. So we have a group that does the retail, and those guys sell or those people sell the phones which are analog phones. Cordless or not cordless. Corded. They have one called Caroline, which is mainly designed for senior people. They have big buttons, loud amplifier, a whole bunch of accessories that go with it. And that group is also responsible for selling baby monitors branded either VTech or Leapfrog. There's another division that's VTech hospitality. They sell hotel room phones. They, are probably number one in hotel room phones. So usually you're in the hotel room, you probably don't notice the phone, but if you do, it's branded the hotel. But if you turn it around, you probably see it's made by VTech. Then you have the group that sells the business phones. Within that, you have, we have some analog business phones still. There's another company that we acquired in 2017 called Snom. It's a German company. That's this company. This company actually is pretty interesting. They were the first to come out with cell phones, and they were the first to mass produce it in 2001, if I'm not mistaken. And in 2017, VTech acquired them. So they do everything that cell phones do, except that wireless solutions as well as SIP amplifier devices. And about a year and a half ago, they acquired another company called Giga out of Germany. Again, these guys only do multi cell CIP solutions. So wireless phones. Now we're at this event, Together we Care. We have several partners that install nurse call systems. And what they do is interesting. The solution is they use our CIP tech cordless phones. So you probably remember having cordless phones in homes. That phone is a cordless base with, like, four handsets. It was probably the most, most of the time branded VTech. So that has one antenna in it, and that connects to all five devices. What the CIP tech solution is. It's multi cell solution, which is we put multiple antennas where these cordless phones will connect to it. So what these partners do is they'll install the nurse call system, install this solution in a senior care facility or an extended care facility. If someone pulls the cord in the room, it goes through the nurse call system. And then on the phone, they get an alert saying, room 200, there's something happening. So that practitioner or nurse would go there and, attend to the patient, cancel the call and so on.
Dan Roberge:
And so you talked before about building a mesh network, if you have poor connectivity in certain parts of the building. So how does that work?
Antoine Karachekhlian:
In our case, instead of using Wi-Fi technology, which is very heavy on the network, there's a lot of data going through it. You have to put in a lot of antennas. Our solution uses dedicated antennas. They are still connected to the network. However, it's dedicated for voice only, and it's secure. So in the case of the way it's being used in these facilities, they're actually receiving a message. They can receive a message or something, what we call a SIP call. So the system would give them a call and an alert would come on saying, basically a voice saying, okay, room 200 something's happening. So the biggest difference is the ruggedness and the secure network. The message will always go through because it's not, sharing the network with other devices for data and competing against, you know, iPads, phone whatever is connected.
Dan Roberge:
Exactly. And so do you also have to like, reserve a certain frequency for that communication that you can't have other devices, let's say, that interact or interfere with it all?
Antoine Karachekhlian:
DEC has its own frequency, and in North America, basically that protocol, is actually a little different in different regions like European DEC frequencies, the band that they use is a little wider than ours. But in North America, I don't know exactly what's the band, but it's in the 1.9 range and it's only reserved for those devices.
Dan Roberge:
So you're always going to get that communication come through and not that interference. So that's great. I know we talked about temperature sensors yesterday, and how VTech would be able to maybe produce those or have kind of the capabilities already. How do you produce new stuff like that? What makes it so flexible and easy to to create new things.
Antoine Karachekhlian:
For us, it would be, I would talk to the folks that take care of all the manufacturing, see if it's something in their wheelhouse, if they can build it. You may have your intellectual property, where you have specs that you would provide to us, and then we can then, have a call with you or your team, look at it, say okay, so you have a design already. So our team would collaborate with your team to see what and how we can produce that.
Dan Roberge:
Amazing. So now you said you're at the show with partners. So what are some of these partners and what did they do?
Antoine Karachekhlian:
So, one of the partners that invites me to this show every year is Zodiac Lightwave. Basically, they install nurse call, wireless nurse call systems in senior homes and extendicare homes. Another one is Version, and the third one is VCI. They all compete in the same realm, but they've all adopted our product because it fits into their larger solution set. So we're a small subset of their overall solution. So they would go meet these customers, and see what their needs are. They may need a wired or wireless nurse call system. I'm not the expert on that. I am the expert on basically the phone that connects to it.
Dan Roberge:
Yeah. Very good, very good. So what's coming up now? Anything new that you want to kind of talk about? That's like new technologies, new things that are exciting in the industry at all?
Antoine Karachekhlian:
Nothing is changing. Just joking. We have some new products coming. With this acquisition that we did last year, Giga set, they're also in the CIP DEC division, but they will actually complement the solution that we have currently. So if we were able to expand right now, the solution expands to about a thousand base stations, using the antennas and 4,000 phones. The new configuration we're going to have can expand much wider than that 6,000 antennas, 22,000 phones. That's like a whole campus. So we can look at a variety type of installations, that we weren't able to do in the past. The other thing that's interesting, which is a buzzword in communication, is that the product line is also team certified. So the teams license can be installed on the portable phone. So there's a lot of new and exciting things happening in that realm for us.
Dan Roberge:
Well, it's been awesome talking to you again. And I appreciate all the information. And maybe we can do this in a long format later. Once we get back to the studios.
Antoine Karachekhlian:
All right. Thank you.
Dan Roberge:
Thank you Antoine.
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