Voxeo announces Prophecy 9 with new management UI, new SIP APIs… and Linux and Mac OS X support!
August 19th, 2008 by Dan YorkTweet
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
Related posts:
- Video/screencast of our new Management Console coming in Prophecy 9
- Voxeo announces a new beta service… Prophecy Log Search – a better way to search your application log files!
- Unlocking Communications with Voxeo’s Prophecy 10
- Voxeo Prophecy 9 is GA and publicly available for free download
- Voxeo announces acquisition of Micromethod bringing new SIP capabilities to our platform
Want to learn how Voxeo can help unlock your communications and deliver a better customer experience? Please contact us!
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August 20th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
That wall of servers looks pretty cool!
I thought Prophecy was limited to only 2 lines, unless you start paying per port or something. Seems like your hosted version is more economical for bursting to several hundred simulataneous calls.
Where does racks of Prophecy servers makes sense?
August 21st, 2008 at 10:02 am
[...] Voxeo has announced the release of the latest version of their Prophecy platform. [...]
August 25th, 2008 at 9:15 am
[...] public links >> ccxml Voxeo announces Prophecy 9 with new management UI, new SIP APIs… and Linux and Mac OS X support! Saved by ceu on Sun 24-8-2008 Summers, Ed: MIME types and library metadata Saved by [...]
August 25th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
[...] Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support [...]
August 25th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Stacy,
Yes, the wall of servers is *very* cool and we’re very much looking forward to making that available for everyone to try out in a forthcoming beta release of Prophecy 9.
Your question about Prophecy is a bit complicated primarily because the answer really depends upon how you expect your traffic to flow. As you note, the free version of Prophecy is limited to 2 simultaneous lines and after that you pay on a *per-port* basis. In contrast, for an application in our hosted environment, you pay on a *per-minute* basis. Yes, odds are that the hosted version will be more economical for bursting to several hundred simultaneous calls.
In the “hosted versus premise” debate, we generally ask questions like these:
1. How “mission critical” is your voice application? Unless you’ve already built out your own massively-scalable, geographically-dispersed, redundant data center network, odds are that our hosting environment will probably provide a more reliability in ensuring that your voice application is always available. On the other hand, if you don’t need that level of reliability, a premise deployment may work fine.
2. What does your traffic profile look like? If your traffic is fairly “steady state” and fluctuates within a small zone, a premise deployment may make sense because you can purchase only the number of ports you need to cover the high end of your usage. On the other hand, if your traffic is “bursty” and has wild fluctuations in volume, a hosted solution may make more sense as you only pay for what you use.
3. Are there security/control requirements within your organization? Sometimes organizations have very specific process/requirements that state that all customer-facing servers/services must be behind the corporate firewall. In that case you may have no other option at all except for a premise solution.
4. Is a fixed-cost solution a requirement? With a premise solution, you pay only on a per-port basis. It’s therefore very easy to arrive at a fixed cost for your voice application solution. With a hosted solution, your cost depends upon the usage and so it may therefore vary, potentially widely depending upon your specific application.
Analyst Nancy Jamison went into these factors a bit more in a white paper she wrote last year at:
http://www.voxeo.com/pdf/JamisonVoxeoWP_SplitDecision.pdf
So to answer your final question about where racks of Prophecy servers make sense, one scenario might be where you have an application that makes or receives a relatively stable number of calls and is either not a mission-critical application or is deployed in a data center environment providing that kind of reliability.
Thanks for commenting and I hope this helped.
Dan
August 27th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
[...] we announced last week that a “early access” release of Prophecy 9 was available, the software was actually only available that day on Mac OS X. Now, however, the Prophecy 9 early [...]
August 28th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Yes, very helpful Dan. Thanks for breaking it down! I need “hosting” but I want “cool” *lol*
September 8th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
[...] that went for about 45 minutes. Jonathan spoke about how and why he started the company, about the new release of Prophecy 9, the acquisition of Micromethod, our recent financial results and much more. I think you all will [...]
September 19th, 2008 at 8:32 am
[...] new Management Console is not yet available in our Prophecy 9 early access release but we expect to include it in a new beta version coming out in the next few weeks. Believe me, we [...]
December 9th, 2008 at 6:56 am
[...] collaboration software – and it almost immediately showed up as a benefit to Voxeo users by the inclusion of important new features in the forthcoming Prophecy 9. This means that Voxeo users will probably soon see some very interesting and useful new features [...]
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:10 am
Hi,
i need Prophery for Fedora 7. Please help me
December 29th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Mani,
Hi. At the current time, we have only tested the Linux version of Prophecy 9 on CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and that is initially what we plan to support for customer production deployments. You are, of course, welcome to download P9 for Linux from http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy/ and install it on Fedora 7 or any other version of Linux – we just cannot yet say ourselves whether or not it will work. We will certainly do our best to support you running P9 on F7. Our only caveat is that at this time if a problem looks like it comes down to an OS-version-related bug, we may not be able to make a fix as quickly as we would if it were CentOS or RHEL.
Thanks for your interest and if you have a (free) developer account at http://evolution.voxeo.com/ you can look through the support forums there and post comments, etc.
Dan
December 30th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
[...] you are not familiar with Prophecy 9, you may find this overview blog post useful and/or our video screencast about the new management [...]