Speaking of Standards

As a strong supporter of open standards, I think one of the aspects of our acquisition of VoiceObjects that was only touched on briefly in the video podcast I did is what this means for the world of standards. Specifically VoiceXML. What intrigues me about VoiceObjects’ platform is not just it’s support for standard VoiceXML, but even more its support for cross-platform VoiceXML. Quoting from our news release:

VoiceObjects uniquely enables the development of phone applications that can be deployed on a wide variety of VoiceXML platforms. This capability is in stark contrast to vendor-specific development solutions offered by Voxeo’s competitors. These single-vendor solutions restrict application deployment to a vendor’s own VoiceXML platform, denying the freedom of vendor independence and application portability the VoiceXML standard was designed to support. Voxeo will continue to openly and actively support VoiceObjects’ application deployment on multiple VoiceXML platforms including Aspect, Avaya, Genesys, Intervoice and Nortel. VoiceObjects will also be available in extremely cost-effective on-demand and on-premise offerings bundled with Voxeo’s own Prophecy VoiceXML Platform.

While VoiceXML is itself an open standard, the way VoiceXML is implemented on some platforms (or “extended“) can certainly wind up restricting deployment to that one platform. We firmly believe customers should be able to develop completely standard VoiceXML apps that can avoid proprietary vendor lock-in and can be moved to other platforms if necessary. I’m delighted to see VoiceObjects added to our portfolio of tools so that even more developers can create voice applications and can be independent and portable. Obviously, we think we have an extremely compelling case for people to deploy their voice applications on our platform, but we want people to do so because it is their choice to do so, not because they are forced to do so.

I’m looking forward to writing more here in the weeks and months ahead about VoiceObjects and the standards it supports.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, voicexml, standards, voiceobjects