Voxeo Talks

In light of some of our recent news releases (see also our blog post) where we reference “Voxeo’s patented platform architecture“, the question naturally has been raised: “do you really have a patent on your architecture?”

Yes, we do!

Back in September 2000, our co-founder and current CEO Jonathan Taylor filed an application for what was eventually issued in July 2005 as US Patent # 6,922,411: “Networked computer telephony system driven by web-based applications”. (You can also read it at Google Patents.)

Here’s the abstract:

A networked telephony system and method allow users to deploy on the Internet computer telephony applications associated with designated telephone numbers. The telephony application is easily created by a user in XML (Extensible Markup Language) with predefined telephony XML tags and easily deployed on a website. The telephony XML tags include those for call control and media manipulation. A call to anyone of these designated telephone numbers may originate from anyone of the networked telephone system such as the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone System), a wireless network, or the Internet. The call is received by an application gateway center (AGC) installed on the Internet. Analogous to a web browser, the AGC provides facility for retrieving the associated XML application from its website and processing the call accordingly. The architecture and design of the system allow for reliability, high quality-of-service, easy scalability and the ability to incorporate additional telephony hardware and software and protocols.

The two major claims (the other 13 claims build off of these) are:

1. A networked computer telephony system, comprising: a plurality of Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents being hosted by web servers on the Internet, each of said XML documents constituting a telephony application associated with a specified call number and including telephony-specific XML scripts with tags instructing how a telephone call to the specified call number is to be processed; one or more application gateway center accessible via the Internet for receiving and processing said telephone call, said one or more application gateway center individually further comprising: a webpage retriever for retrieving the XML document associated with the specified call number; a virtual machine for running a set of telephony-specific opcodes; and a telephony scripting language parser for interpreting the XML scripts in the retrieved XML document into said telephony-specific opcodes for execution on said virtual machine to process said telephone call.

9. A method of processing a telephone call to a specific call number, comprising: providing an Extensible Markup Language (XML) document associated with the specified call number, said XML document constituting a telephony application and including telephony-specific XML tags instructing how a telephone call to the specified call number is to be processed; posting said XML document to a specified location on the Internet; providing a directory for locating said XML document by the specified call number; receiving said telephone call on the Internet; retrieving said XML document at the specified location looked up from said directory with the specified call number; providing a virtual machine for running a set of telephony-specific opcodes; parsing the XML scripts in the retrieved XML document into said telephony-specific opcodes; and executing said parsed opcodes on said virtual machine to process said telephone call.

For those of you who, like me, enjoy reading about network architecture, the full patent text gives great insight into both the Voxeo network architecture and also into how “telephony” has evolved over the years into what can be done today (once you get over the patent language).

So yes, we do indeed have a patent on our architecture!

P.S. Bonus points to any astute observers who noticed before that we have listed this patent for quite a long time in the footer to our Evolution developer portal.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, patents, voip, telephony, telecommunications, xml

You’ve seen our Evolution developer portal, right? It’s home to over 30,000 developers who have collectively built over 55,000 voice applications. It’s used by everyone from some of the largest companies out there running their customer service applications on our commercial Prophecy Hosting service to tiny startups using just our free developer accounts to look at how they can add voice to their new Web 2.0 site. On the back end, it’s a massively-scalable redundant cloud-computing infrastructure that executes applications and provides connectivity to the Internet, the traditional phone network (PSTN) and the ever-evolving SIP infrastructure, plus handles all the billing and management issues.

Now imagine this:

What if you could have your OWN custom-branded version of our Evolution site?

What if you could have a voice application platform that you made available to your customers so that they could build voice applications?

What if you were:

• a carrier/service provider looking to provide additional services to customers such as hosted IVR that could earn you additional revenue?

• a vendor of telecommunications equipment without a hosted IVR/application offering looking to quickly add such an offering?
• a large enterprise looking to enable your internal business units to easily and quickly create voice applications without necessarily needing to engage with IT or professional services groups?

Now let’s take it one step further and imagine this:

What if you could do all of this without having to provide/run/maintain the infrastructure?

No servers to provision. No infrastructure to build. No software to upgrade. No system administration. No connections to the PSTN to worry about.

Now stop imagining… that’s exactly what we announced today: availability over our IVR and SIP hosting infrastructure as a completely re-brandable Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. Now, you, too, can have your own branded voice/IVR/SIP application platform. You can sign up customers and have them run (and develop) their own VoiceXML/CCXML/SIP applications. If you want, you can charge them and bill them by the minute.

All by way of your own completely rebranded web portal. No need to mention Voxeo – in fact, your customers never need to know. It’s your service offering. It’s your platform. We just provide the cloud behind it all – and remove all the infrastructure worries. Need it to grow more and run more applications? Need more inbound phone numbers? Need to make more outbound calls? You don’t worry about that… our cloud adjusts automagically to handle your needs. We provide the IVR virtualization or SIP virtualization layer. You just get to focus on building applications.

From a graphical point of view, it basically looks like this[1]:

Now the obvious concerns when contemplating a move like this include: How reliable is the platform? How secure is the platform? To answer, I’ll point to these parts of the news release:

Voxeo runs four fully redundant, proven, and patented hosting facilities from geographically diverse locations in the US and Europe. These facilities house over 800 servers today, each capable of processing over 200 concurrent phone calls. Through Voxeo’s patented platform architecture, this cloud-based, multi-server infrastructure appears to customers as a single virtualized, multi-tenant IVR system with nearly unlimited scalability. Thanks to Voxeo’s network diversity customers know their IVR failover and scalability requirements are comprehensively addressed. The hosted offering is completely managed and controlled using Voxeo’s brandable online customer and developer web portal, which includes Voxeo Designer, a flexible Visio-like visual telephony application development tool. Enterprise applications and telephony resources interact with the platform via standards such as VoiceXML, CCXML, HTTP, SOAP and SIP.

Voxeo has invested over $50m in the delivery of its IVR hosting network and continuously adds new capacity as customer demand increases. Voxeo’s platform includes comprehensive call control features to make, take, route, and connect calls; as well as robust voice media features to play, record, conference, recognize, and synthesize speech in 12 different languages. Voxeo will open a fifth hosting facility in Europe this year and anticipates launching facilities in Asia and other markets in 2009.

Obviously for customers serious about our PaaS offering we’ll go into more detail. We are also one of the only ones in the industry to offer a 100% uptime guarantee (or we pay you) and our PaaS offering can be configured in such a way to fall under this SLA.

I’d note that this Platform-as-a-Service offering isn’t just some nice theory… it’s out there being used today by a very large customer as an OEM platform. It’s very real.

Interested in learning more? Would you like to offer a complete (and branded) voice application platform to your customers or users? If so, drop us an email to sales@voxeo.com or use that phone thingamajig to call +1-407-418-1800.

[1] Although to be completely accurate, all those arrows should have an arrowhead on both ends because the information flows in both directions.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, platform as a service, paas, voice, voip, voice applications, telephony, ivr, ivr virtualization, sip, sip applications, voicexml, ccxml

In the weeks and months ahead you’ll hear us talk more and more about “cloud computing” as that term becomes increasingly mainstream (as I did in our Speaking of Standards blog last week). To us, it’s not at all a new concept as it’s what we have been doing with our platform since we launched way back in 1999.

With our hosted platform, we give you a massive computing cloud upon which you can run your voice applications. You just create the application and let our platform (i.e. our “cloud”) worry about scaling, redundancy, computing power, etc. (Our Quick Start Guide gives an overview.) There’s no need to worry about how many “ports” you have or how many server instances or what type of CPUs you are using. All of that fades away. You develop your voice applications (IVR apps or SIP apps) and run them… and our cloud takes care of all the infrastructure.

Of course, if we are doing to talk about the term “cloud computing”, it helps to provide some definition. On this note, I have to really hand it to the folks over at Joyent who compiled this excellent video of responses to the question “What is cloud computing?” from attendees at the recent Web 2.0 conference. Links to the people you’ll see are available on Joyent’s weblog (“Joyeur”) but courtesy of YouTube here is the video:

While Joyent is focused on providing cloud computing for rich web applications, the responses in the video are equally true for the voice applications that we support on our cloud computing platform. (And, like Joyent, we are strong believers that any cloud computing needs to be based on open standards to avoid vendor lock-in.)

Ultimately, what we now call “cloud computing” is the fulfillment of the dreams many of us have had since the early days of computing… creating a massive “cloud”, comprised itself of numerous smaller clouds, which let your applications “just work” and allows you to focus on building killer applications and not having to worry about the infrastructure to run those applications.

It’s a pretty amazing time right now – and we’re thrilled to be part of it all!

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, voxeo, joyent

We’ll confess that we really didn’t mind waking up this morning and seeing right on the front page of the business section of the Orlando Sentinel this article: “Sure there’s a slump, but some thrive too like Voxeo of Orlando“.

The article is very true… we do have a barista… we have been profitable since 2004 (and continue to be)… Gartner did indeed position us in the visionary quadrant… and yes, we are hiring!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, orlando, orlando sentinel

If you are friendfeed user, you can now follow what we publish online at http://friendfeed.com/voxeo. (And even if you aren’t a friendfeed user you can still visit that web page or subscribe to that page via RSS.)

Given that you can already subscribe to our blogs via RSS, Twitter and email, why yet another way to follow what we publish online?

Simply put… aggregation.

If you subscribe to either our RSS, Twitter or email feeds, you get all the blog posts that we create here on this site. But what about all the other “social” web sites in which we have a presence? What about our Flickr photos? or our YouTube videos? Or presentations on SlideShare? Unless we specifically link to them here or embed them in a blog post, subscribers to our RSS/Twitter/email feeds won’t know about them.

That’s the beauty of Friendfeed. It is the most prominent of a new round of services that let you easily aggregate what you publish across many services into a single web page and RSS feed. If you go to friendfeed.com/voxeo you will see all of our blog posts, but also our Flickr pictures, YouTube videos, SlideShare presentations and whatever else we put up there. (Now, you may not see those services today on that page because recently we have published more blog posts than videos/photos/presentations, but if you go to the second page of entries on Friendfeed, you’ll see how it all mixes together.) As we explore new services that are supported by Friendfeed, we’ll be able to add them there as well.

Anyway, it’s just another way for us to let you all know what we are doing – and also to engage in the ongoing conversation through comments there (as well as our blogs). Please do check us out at friendfeed.com/voxeo and if you use friendfeed, please do feel free to follow us!

Technorati Tags: friendfeed, voxeo

Over the next couple of months you’ll get a chance to hear from us and meet us at a couple of upcoming conferences.

First, from July 21-25 I’ll be up in Portland, Oregon, at O’Reilly’s OSCON 2008 giving a talk on “Mashing up Voice and the Web through Open Source and XML“. As the intro says:

With over 4.5 billion mobile and fixed phones out there as of November 2007, the phone represents the most ubiquitous user interface out there. As “mashups” on the web let us quickly and easily access information from multiple data sources, how do we extend those mashups to the world of the phone? How do we bring the old world of voice and telephony into the new world of the web, social networks and social media? And how do we do that using open source tools and open standards?

The session description gets into a bit more about specifically what I’ll be addressing. It should be a good time! As you can see from the schedule, OSCON is a strongly developer-focused show and so it should be a great time connecting with developers out there and talking about our platform. Speaking at this show is a bit of neat experience for me personally, too, as I spoke at one of the first OSCON’s back in 2000 when it was still called the “Open Source Conference” and was held in Monterey, CA. I know a good number of folks in the O’Reilly orbit so I’m looking forward to connecting with lots of people out there.

Next up, both RJ and I will be speaking at SpeechTEK, August 18-20 in New York City. In fact, we’ll have a team of Voxeons there as we’ll have an exhibit booth and all sorts of things going on at the show. (More on that in later posts.)

RJ will be speaking first on Monday, August 18th, along with VoiceXML Forum founder Ken Rehor on the subject of “The Impact of W3C standard languages“:

The publication of W3C standard languages, such as VoiceXML and CCXML, has dramatically changed the speech application design process. This session discusses some of the efforts to extend and validate the use of standard languages. Learn how the call control language can work with SIP and VoIP to implement an extensible SIP softswitch. Discover how the VoiceXML Forum’s certification program has impacted the cross-vendor interoperability of VoiceXML by VoiceXML platform vendors.

Given our huge focus on open standards and RJ’s direct involvement as chair of the W3C’s CCXML Working Group, you can expect this session to deliver a wealth of information! (Hmmm… how high can I set the expectation bar for RJ? Hmmm… “he’s going to show how open standards solve world hunger!”… no, that’s a bit too high! RJ is, though, an excellent presenter as you may get a glimpse of from his past slide decks.)

I’ll follow with a session on Tuesday, August 19th, called “Securing CCXML and VoiceXML Applications“:

How secure are your speech applications? As the usage of both VoiceXML and CCXML continues to explode, and VoIP usage continues to grow dramatically, especially within enterprise environments, it is increasingly important that you ensure that applications and services are not open to attack. Learn about the potential vulnerabilities in a system using VoiceXML or CCXML, what you can do to secure these systems, and how you can develop a strong architecture.

Given my VoIP security background, it’s somewhat predictable that I’d be talking on this subject, eh? Seriously, though, it’s an area that doesn’t seem to be getting a whole lot of thought and so I’ll be taking a look at what the real risks are and how you can look at addressing them.

If you are going to either OSCON or SpeechTEK, please do leave a comment here or drop us an email and let us know. We love to meet face-to-face with blog readers and/or customers/developers. As much as we are able to do so (not sure yet), we’ll make the presentations available through this site. Stay tuned for more info – and we look forward to potentially seeing some of you in either Portland or New York!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, conferences, rj auburn, dan york, oscon, oreilly, oscon2008, speechtek, speechtek2008, voicexml, security, voip security, ccxml, mashups, xml

Have you checked out the Party Line application for Facebook that I wrote about a few weeks back?

Well, the folks at Equals have spent some time working on the application and listening to the feedback from users. They’ve made some changes to it and also clarified some of the usage terms. Here are the major changes:

• Removed the initial advertisement that people being called out had to listen to when they were put into a call. Callers now just get dropped immediately into the conference bridge so that you can start talking! Note that the person initiating the call still hears a brief ad while the service is connecting the other members of the call.

• Clarified in their FAQ that calls are at least for the initial rollout limited to a maximum of 15 minutes.

The team there at Equals is continuing to look at ways to improve the application and are definitely looking for feedback as well. If you haven’t checked it out, we encourage you to read our previous post and then simply get started using the Party Line application inside of Facebook.

We’d also note that Equals CEO Ajay Madhok recently gave an interview to The Social Times which has now been released as a podcast if you would like to know more about the company and what they are doing.

We’re pleased to see an application using our platform to bring voice inside of Facebook – and we look forward to seeing what they come up with next!

Technorati Tags: applications, facebook, facebook applications, facebook platform, voxeo, equals, social networking, voip, voice, voice applications, voice mashups, sip, prophecy, ccxml, xml, voicexml, ivr, opensocial, party line, conferencing, collaboration

Would you like to learn what’s involved with “creating Communication 2.0 applications?” Now courtesy of the great folks at IT Conversations you can listen to Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn give his eComm 2008 presentation on just this topic. Over in our Voxeo Developers Corner blog, we previously linked to RJ’s slide set and provided the source code for his CCXML -> Twitter example, but now you can listen to the talk as well. Here’s the description of his talk, which runs about 15 minutes:

Developing applications for telephony and communication is very difficult. There are old, proprietary systems to integrate with, standards are rare, and when there are standards, they are implemented differently and can’t be integrated out of the box. Telephone networks are also closed and restricted by NDAs. Compared to web development, telephony development is a hassle.

RJ Auburn of Voxeo describes how his company’s telephony development stack is the infrastructure that will unlock the creativity of application developers. Using voice XML and CC-XML, developers can interact with telephone services similar to using a web service. This spares them from having to know the gory details of the telephone network. He compares it to the difference between writing standard web pages and having to write an Apache plug-in for each site.

He concludes by showing a sample application that will make a phone call each time a tweet is received from Twitter. This only takes a couple minutes when using the developer tools from Voxeo.

We hope you enjoy RJ’s presentation and if you want to try your hand at creating “Communications 2.0 Applications”, be sure to check out either our free hosted platform or on-premise platform – both available at www.voxeo.com/free We look forward to seeing what great applications you create!

Technorati Tags: applications, voxeo, rjauburn, ecomm, ecomm2008, conferences, presentations, ccxml, twitter, mashups, voice, telephony