Dialogic today bought APEX Communications in a move to provide real-time voice applications to its service provider customers. The delivery of such applications as interactive voice response (IVR), voicemail, and conferencing marks a new business for Dialogic, which ultimately wants its array of products to tie into a wider network functions virtualization (NFV) story.

As a communications infrastructure provider, Dialogic made its name with its media server. But it “made the decision from a strategy perspective to go into the application space directly,” says Dialogic CEO Bill Crank, who adds that the APEX acquisition “jump starts” that strategy.

Both Dialogic and APEX are private companies, and terms of their deal were not disclosed.

Dialogic says its service provider customers want applications to be deployed with agility, so it has created a complete architecture to provide this. Its framework includes media processing with Dialogic’s own switches and software to its load-balancer, which is already deployed at Tier 1s, and to applications and managed cloud offerings.

“We can sell that whole framework to somebody, or they can buy components of that,” says Crank. “We’re going to get carriers that pick individual components – and some want to have one neck to choke.”

APEX CEO Ben Levy has joined Dialogic as VP of applications.

As Dialogic pursues its end-to-end product framework, NFV will come into play, as the company wants to tie into other's management and orchestration layers. Already, “our VNFs [virtual network functions] are integrated into Oracle’s MANO,” says Crank.