Speaking of Standards

SIPit 25 starts four weeks from today at the University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Lab (IOL). What is SIPit? As the UNH-IOL page for the event says:

SIPit’s, or Session Initiation Protocol Interoperability Tests, are weeklong events where people bring their SIP implementations to ensure they work together. SIPIT Events are open to anyone with a working SIP implementation. The goal of the events is to refine both the protocol and its implementations. The SIPIT events are a driving force shaping SIP into a globally interoperable protocol for real time Internet communication services.

Basically, they are a place where vendors can privately test their SIP implementations against each other. Results of the testing are not publicly released – other than an aggregate news release talking about what occurred overall. It’s a place where, as a vendor, you get a great chance to see how well your SIP-based product interoperates with that of other vendors. It’s also a place where vendors will often bring early implementations of new SIP standards to test those against other vendors working on early implementations. All in all, it definitely helps with moving us all along the path toward increasing SIP interconnection.

We’ll have a Voxeo team at this SIPit. We’ve been based on SIP since we started our company back in 1999 and we’re continually looking at ways to increase our performance and support for evolving SIP standards. We value the feedback we gain from these SIPit events and try to attend when we can.

You can attend, too, as there is still space available. The UNH IOL event page has more info and there is an online registration form as well. (Deadline to register, though, is September 4th.)

P.S. And yes, since yours truly lives about two hours west of UNH, I *am* planning to head over and meet our testing team for dinner probably in beautiful Portsmouth, NH… I’m in “marketing” now, so they don’t let me near the test equipment. I mean, in my world, all the tests just work, right? And they have really pretty charts to go with them…

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

Recently we came across a great series of articles at InformIT on the subject of VoiceXML. Written by Frank Coyne, they cover the range from an introduction to VoiceXML up through using VoiceXML with social networks. Nicely, the author mentions Voxeo and talks about how the exercises he lays out can be done using a free developer account on our evolution.voxeo.com site. Here are the articles:

• “An Introduction to VoiceXML“
• “Part 2: Working with Forms“
• “Part 3: VoiceXML Grammars“
• “Part 4: Grammars, Scope and Event Handlers“
• “Part 5: VoiceXML meets Web 2.0“

You can also get a list of all the articles as well as a blog entry from Frank Coyne back in August titled “Mashin’ Up with Voice XML“. To probably no one’s surprise, I was personally most intrigued by Part 5. Having done a ton of work with XSLT stylesheets in the past I enjoyed the part about creating dynamic Voice XML using XSLT stylesheets to generate the VoiceXML:

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1017851&seqNum=6

Linking VoiceXML to triggering Gmail delivery is also quite cool:

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1017851&seqNum=8

As I am personally just coming up to speed on VoiceXML, I’ll be working through many of these tutorials in my own evolution account. (Since accounts are free, you are welcome to sign up and check it out yourself.)

Technorati Tags: voicexml, tutorial, voxeo