Voxeo Talks

As Skype CEO Josh Silverman announced on Skype’s blog today, it’s Skype’s 5th birthday today. It was back on August 29, 2003 that the first public beta of Skype was announced.

Happy Birthday, Skype!

Long-time users of Skype or Voxeo may recall that we originally partnered with Skype back in 2005 as part of their Voice Services Program, which was Skype’s original attempt at building a developer program. Skype’s program has morphed today into something a bit different through their Developer Zone and Extras program, but we’ve still retained connections with Skype.

In fact, I wrote about how to “Skype-ify” your voice applications back in March and any application you develop through our hosted Evolution developer portal automagically gets inbound Skype connectivity. Even for our free developer accounts!

We’re also huge fans of Skype internally and so we congratulate them on their fifth birthday and look forward to seeing what they do next.

---

P.S. You may also be interested in some thoughts I posted on my external blog around my view on how Skype has disrupted telephony over the past five years.

Technorati Tags: skype, voip, voice, voxeo

Are you are Facebook user? Would you like to stay up-to-date on what we’re doing here at Voxeo? If so, please consider joining our new Facebook page for Voxeo as a “fan”. If you visit the page, you’ll see information about upcoming events, photos from recent events and other information that we add from time to time. In the upper right menu there will be a link to “Join as a Fan”.

As a “fan” of Voxeo, you’ll also be able to receive any occasional updates we may send out about new services, new products or such things as new Facebook apps which use our platform. We won’t spam you… to be honest we’re still exploring how exactly we’ll use the page. We just know that as more of us use Facebook, it’s something we want to experiment with. If you’d like to join us in the grand experiment, we’d love to have you as a fan. (Thanks!)

And if you are already a fan of other pages within Facebook, we’d love to hear from you about what you have found most useful from the various pages around. What kind of information would you like us to provide? How can we make it the best possible communication experience?

Technorati Tags: facebook, voxeo

Are you are available tomorrow, Tuesday, August 26th, at 11am US Eastern time? If so, you are invited to join in to Alec Saunders’ daily “Squawk Box” conference call / podcast where Alec will be interviewing Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor about all the recent news about Voxeo, including:

• Voxeo announced record growth and global expansion
• Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support

• Voxeo acquired Micromethod Technologies
• Voxeo named 2008 Market Leader by Speech Technology Magazine

The call will take place using Alec’s company Iotum’s “Calliflower” conferencing/collaboration application. To join in to the call, you simply need to go to either of the following links to “join” the call and receive a PIN and call-in number for the call:

• Calliflower Facebook application - If you are a Facebook user, simply go to:

  http://apps.new.facebook.com/calliflower/conf/show/37402

  You will be prompted to add the Calliflower Facebook application and then will receive the call-in information.

• Calliflower.com site - If you are not a Facebook user or just don’t want to add another Facebook application, you can go to the Calliflower.com site at this URL:

  http://apps.calliflower.com/conf/show/37402

  You will be prompted to create a free Calliflower.com user account if you have not already done so.

Both links are live today so you can go right now and RSVP to attend the call tomorrow. If you do so, you should also receive a reminder about 15 minutes prior to the call tomorrow morning.

When you join the call tomorrow, you can also use the Calliflower web interface through either of the links above to see who else has joined the call and also to participate in the “live chat” area during the call itself. Typically Alec will ask a series of questions of the guest and then open it to others who are participating in the call. If you’d like to learn more about what is up with Voxeo and/or ask questions of our CEO, tomorrow’s a great opportunity for you to do so.

It should be a fun time and we’re looking forward to the conversation. Please do feel free to join in!

NOTE: If you are not available to join the call, it is being recorded and will be made available through Alec’s Saunderslog.com site sometime later tomorrow. We’ll post an update here on this blog site as well.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, squawk box, jonathan taylor

In what I’ve learned has become an annual tradition at SpeechTEK, we released yesterday our “State of Voxeo” news release. The title pretty much says it all: “Voxeo Announces Global Expansion and Record Growth“. Here’s the financial performance part:

From July 2007 to June 2008 Voxeo’s revenue increased 99.7% over the prior twelve months. In North America and Europe revenues grew 94% and 470% respectively. Voxeo’s performance significantly outpaced revenue growth seen by a peer group of eighteen leading public Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, which saw a 48% mean increase in revenues over the same period. Unlike most SaaS vendors, Voxeo grew significantly while maintaining profitability and has now closed 18 consecutive profitable quarters.

Yes, we should have rounded our 99.7% revenue increase up to simply “100%”, but we honestly didn’t think anyone would believe us if we put that in. And yes, that last bit means we have actually been making a profit for the last 4.5 years. (And we also realize that the concept of making money and growing organically through profit is a rather radical idea in these times, but we rather like the idea.)

We also continue to be pleased by the recognition we are receiving within the industry:

In a recent Strategic Focus Report on “Hosted Speech and Outbound IVR Services”, Datamonitor ranked Voxeo as the only company strong across all metrics of the IVR landscape, beating 17 other IVR companies. In February Voxeo announced that Gartner, Inc., a leading research and advisory firm, has “positioned Voxeo in the Visionaries Quadrant of its Magic Quadrant for IVR Systems and Enterprise Voice Portals, 2008 report”. Voxeo’s placement is based on “its ability to execute and completeness of vision.” In June, Voxeo was the recipient of the exclusive Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Innovation for its Prophecy Voice Platform products and services. In July Voxeo won the 2007 Product of the Year award from Communications Solutions. Finally, in August Voxeo won the 2008 Speech Technology Magazine Speech Solution Award for “Best Self-Service Suite”.

Our focus continues to be on delivering the best possible platform for executing voice applications and providing the best possible support to our customers. We’re delighted to see that focus being recognized and do appreciate the kind words being said about us.

The “State of Voxeo” news release also speaks of the great improvements in our Extreme Support program, the number of customers we’ve added and the number of developers who have worked with our product. While I’m not going to copy the entire news release here, given my particular interest in helping build our developer community, I loved seeing this:

In addition, over the past 18 months over 20,000 developers have installed Voxeo’s openly downloadable Prophecy software platform and over 8,000 have joined Voxeo’s Evolution developer program. As of August 2008 over 31,000 developers have joined Evolution.

In these times of economic turmoil, we are thrilled to be able to put out a news release like this… and we remain incredibly thankful and grateful to all of our customers, developers and partners who continue to choose our platform for their voice applications. We look forward to continuing to help our customers grow their businesses and build stronger and better applications that help people communicate. Thanks to you all!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, voice, applications, voip

Today here at SpeechTEK in New York City, we formally launched the early access edition of our new release, Prophecy 9. With this release (which you can download now) we have announced several major steps in the evolution of our product:

1. Prophecy 9 is cross-platform with support for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Yes, Prophecy 9 is indeed out on Mac OS X! In fact, at this exact moment you can go to the Prophecy page and download the Mac OS X build now. (Windows and Linux builds are on their way soon.) In fact, we believe that Prophecy 9 is the first comprehensive, standards-based telephony application platform to support Mac OS X.

Why Mac OS X? Simple. Go to any developer conference and look at the dominant laptop in use. Look at our office where the MacBook Pro is our corporate laptop. Developers have spoken and are choosing Mac OS X in huge numbers. We understand that - hence the Mac version. We don’t honestly know how many customers will actually run Mac OS X on production servers, but the beauty of our platform is that it works the same across all operating systems, so developers can build applications on Prophecy on one operating system and deploy those apps in production on another.

Speaking of production environments, our customers have been asking for a Linux version and we are delighted to provide that with Prophecy 9. P9 will run on any Intel-based CentOS 5 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system. Between this new Linux support and our existing Windows support, Prophecy 9 should now be able to be deployed in any data center.

2. Prophecy 9 will redefine what it means to manage large numbers of servers.

Don’t believe me? Look at this (click on the image for a larger version):

I’ll put up a screencast soon to show how incredibly cool this “3D wall” is… it displays the current status of all your servers and you can zoom in, move around, view individual servers. But there’s even more (click on image for larger version):

From a product point-of-view, here’s what we’re calling these new management features:

• Prophecy Commander - a new operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning system that lets customers easily deploy and manage telephony applications on a single server, single-site cluster, or multi-site cluster of Prophecy servers
• Prophecy Dashboard - provides a comprehensive yet concise overview of the performance of any Prophecy server, server group, virtual platform, or application
• Prophecy Log Analyst - collects and indexes Prophecy generated data and call logs in real time

And yes, that “Prophecy Log Analyst” is a premise version of the Prophecy Log Search we provide in Evolution. How great is that?

[Note: The "Dashboard" shown above is not in the early access release of Prophecy 9 available today but is expected to be in the next beta release.]

3. Prophecy 9 will offer new SIP APIs for developers

Since it’s inception, Prophecy has been entirely based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and all about the open standards of VoiceXML and CCXML… what we call “XML-based telephony”. With our acquisition of Micromethod Technologies, also announced today, we’re now adding into the product the following:

• Prophecy SIPcore - adds support for the latest SIP and IMS standards for Voice over IP
• Prophecy SIPmethod - a converged SIP servlet, HTTP servlet, and Web-service application server, used for rapid development and deployment of Java-API based communication solutions
• Prophecy SIPpoint - a comprehensive solution for SIP user collaboration, connectivity, routing, and messaging

I’ll be writing much more about SIPmethod over on our Voxeo Developers Corner blog in the weeks ahead, but suffice it to say now that developers will be able to use SIP Servlets - JSR 116 and JSR 289 - which will open up all sorts of new opportunities for applications to interact with our platform.

Beyond all of that, Prophecy 9 delivers over 200 smaller improvements and fixes as well as all features found in Prophecy 8. More info can be found in our news release and perhaps more importantly the Prophecy 9 Release Notes.

WANT TO PLAY?

Do you want to try out the early access release of Prophecy 9?

Just go to www.voxeo.com/prophecy and look for the “Get Prophecy 9 ‘Early Access’” column.

Do keep one thing in mind: this is an “early access” release. You may find bugs. You may find things are missing (for instance, on the Mac version the SIP phone we include in Windows isn’t there and we recommend instead that people download SJphone). We know that.

The point is that we want to give you all a chance to play with the new release. Tell us what you like. Tell us what you don’t like. (Please just raise tickets in Evolution as you normally would.)

We’re incredibly excited about all the new features we’re rolling out… and we look forward to hearing what you all think!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, prophecy, voicexml, ccxml, sip, applications, micromethod, programming, apple, mac, macosx, linux

Today we are extremely pleased to announce our acquisition of Micromethod, a developer of SIP-based communication and collaboration software based in Beijing, China, and San Jose, CA. Micromethod CTO Wei Chen, now Chief Architect for Voxeo, reporting to CTO RJ Auburn, provided this video comment from the floor of SpeechTEK:

With the acquisition of Micromethod, we gain an Asian presence and also add three new products:

SIPMethod - an end-to-end platform for rapid development and deployment of SIP communication solutions. SIPMethod supports more than 30 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Java Specification Request (JSR), and W3C standards including SIP and HTTP Servlets, JAX-WS, JMX, and STUN. SIPMethod also supports converged SIP and HTTP applications, enabling flexible mashups of telephony, IM, presence, web 2.0, and SOAP/REST services and applications.

SIPoint - a comprehensive solution for SIP user collaboration, connectivity, routing, and messaging. SIPoint is built on the SIPMethod platform, includes SIP registrar, location, redirect, proxy, instant messaging, XCAP and presence services, adding support for 18 more IETF standards for SIMPLE, and OMA and 3GPP presence.

Horizon - a highly effective SIP firewall, NAT, and VPN solution. Horizon both enables secure SIP audio, video, and data connections and helps those connections traverse existing firewall and NAT implementations that block or break SIP-based collaboration. Horizon is also built on the SIPMethod platform. An H.323-compliant version of Horizon is also available.

You’ll see much more here on our blog site about these products in the weeks ahead. We’ve already incorporated Micromethod software in our new early access release to Prophecy 9 and will be offering much, much more in terms of integration in the future. In the meantime, you can read about SIP Servlet programming at the Micromethod developer portal or download Prophecy 9 for Mac OS X today and try it out yourself!

We welcome our new colleagues in both Beijing and San Jose and look forward to the incredible things we’ll be doing together!

Today here in New York, the SpeechTEK conference starts in a few hours and we’ve got quite a crew here in the city. We’ll have a booth in operation… RJ, Jose and I are speaking… Moshe Yudkowsky and other “friends of Voxeo” are speaking… we have some MAJOR news announcements coming out this week… press/analyst briefings… and so much more! It’s going to be a busy week for us all.

If you’d like to stay up on what we’re doing throughout the week, here are some ways you can do so:

• This Voxeo Talks blog - we intend to be posting updates throughout the show.
• Our twitter stream - twitter.com/voxeo - I’m intending to use it to post about some of the activities we’re doing as they are breaking.
• Our Flickr stream - www.flickr.com/photos/voxeo - We’ve been taking some photos already… next we need to upload them!
• My (Dan York) Twitter stream - twitter.com/danyork - I’m set up to send updates from my Blackberry so depending upon how good the show Internet coverage is, I may wind up tweeting more to my personal account.

And if you are here at the show, please do drop me a note and let us know… and do stop by our booth (#804) and check out what’s new!

And now… with audio and video gear in tow, I’ve got to head downstairs and get ready for the start of the show…

Technorati Tags: speechtek, voxeo, conferences, newyork

Will you be at SpeechTEK next week in New York? If so, you’ll see a whole crowd of us from Voxeo. RJ and I will both be speaking and more Voxeons will be there staffing our booth. In keeping with what has become our tradition, we have a number of major announcements we’ll be making… stay tuned for more!

If you are going to be there at the show, please do drop me a line or swing by our booth (804) on the exhibit floor.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, speechtek, conferences

This afternoon I’ll be heading to the airport to fly out to Chicago to be part of ClueCon this week. Haven’t heard of ClueCon before? Here’s the quick summary:

ClueCon - is an annual 3-Day Telephony User and Developer Conference bringing together the entire spectrum of Telephony from TDM circuits to VoIP and everything in between. The presentations and discussions will cover several open source telephony applications such as Asterisk/Callweaver, Kamailio (formerly OpenSER), Bayonne, YATE and FreeSWITCH.

Billed as the “Telephony Developer Conference” it primarily focuses on the whole world of open source telephony. We (Voxeo) were there in a previous year talking about the open source VoiceXML apps we help promote through RocketSource.org.

I’ll be there this year as part of two panels. First, tomorrow I’ll be joining fellow VoIP bloggers Andy Abramson and Thomas Howe on a “VoIP Roundtable” to talk about current industry themes and trends. Then on Thursday I’ll be part of a “VoIP Security Roundtable” talking about… gee… can you guess?

It should be a fun event… I’m looking forward to catching up with Andy, Thomas, Moshe Yudkowsky, Jon Todd and several others. There are also some folks on the schedule with whom I have corresponded but never physically me, so that will be nice as well. If any of you reading this will also be there, please do feel free to drop me a note so that we can connect.

Technorati Tags: telephony, cluecon, cluecon2008, voip, voxeo, open source, opensource, dan york, danyork, conferences, chicago, applications, telecommunications, developers

UPDATE: In answer to several questions I’ve received, yes, I did record this presentation and will make that available soon. Once I do, I will also link it to the slide presentation so the slides can be viewed in sync with the audio.

---

As I mentioned previously (also here), I was at O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) last week up in Portland, Oregon, giving a talk on “Mashing Up Voice and the Web Through Open Source and XML“. It was fun to be back at OSCON for the first time since 2000 when I had been out there as the head of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) and was talking then about Linux certification. It was great to see so many people who I knew from back in those days who are still very active in Linux and open source activities.

It was also quite frankly great to be out there not speaking about VoIP security but rather talking about voice mashups and XML! Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy speaking about VoIP security and do it all the time (including next week at ClueCon) but as a speaker it’s sure nice to have some variety. It was also fun for me in this talk to dive down into the weeds and step through code line-by-line, something I haven’t done in quite some time in a presentation (but used to do all the time when teaching training classes).

Another fun aspect of the talk at OSCON was that Evan Prodromou, the founder and main developer of the open source identi.ca microblogging site was sitting there in the audience. Since most all of my demos involved adding voice to identi.ca, he was very interested in what I was showing and we had several great conversations later.

Anyway, my slides are now available through SlideShare, and I’d definitely welcome any comments or feedback on the slide set (either here or over on SlideShare) as I’ll be using some aspects of these slides in other talks:

I’ve received a good number of positive comments and evaluations about the talk and am glad that so many folks found it helpful. The one negative comment I’ve received was that a couple of people were really looking to see how they could add voice to their web interface and all my demos showed how to use a voice interface to interact with web sites. It’s a fair critique. I mention that you could do “click-to-call”, but I didn’t actually show this feature with a demo. I was originally planning to include a demo of putting a conference widget onto a web site, but in the end decided not to include it because I liked the other demos better and only had ~45 minutes for the whole presentation. Another time, though, I’ll probably include such a demo to provide both perspectives. (Meanwhile, I think that’s a great blog post to put up on our Voxeo Developers Corner blog in the next bit.)

Speaking of our Voxeo Developers Corner blog, I’ll also be taking each of my demos and stepping through them section by section in a series of posts over on that blog. Look for those to appear soon.

And, of course, if you’d like to try out any of the demos yourself using the code in my presentation, just head over to our Evolution developer portal and sign up for a free developer account and start creating applications.

P.S. Please do let me know if you do anything cool with linking voice into identi.ca (or Twitter) as it’s a subject I’m rather interested in. You can follow me there on identi.ca at identi.ca/danyork

Technorati Tags: SIP, slides, voice, voice applications, voice apps, voice mashups, voip, oscon, oscon2008, voxeo, mashups, voicexml, ccxml, identi.ca, microblogging, twitter, conferences, presentations, dan york, danyork