Voxeo Talks

If you are an industry analyst or blogger attending SpeechTEK 2009 from August 24-26 in New York City, you are invited to join us for dinner on Tuesday, August 25. Following a long-standing Voxeo tradition, it will of course be Indian food. Space is limited so please contact Megan Maxwell if you are interested in joining.

P.S. We are also open to including analysts or bloggers living in NYC and covering our industry but not attending SpeechTEK.

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Voxeo announced today that the company made the “Top 100 Best Companies to Work for in Florida” list. As a marketing professional, I was happy to hear the good news and excited to share it. As a Voxeo employee, I wasn’t at all surprised. My colleagues and I have the good fortune to experience first hand what makes Voxeo a great place to work.

“Voxeons” tend to be highly enthusiastic about their jobs and this is a big part of why the work environment is so remarkable. Voxeo’s open-air office setup facilitates frequent communication and project collaboration. The fact that we share a common mission to create, market, sell and support a superior product further contributes to a consistently high energy level. And then there’s our 99% customer retention rate – a statistic in which we take great pride. 

Of course the power of great benefits and perks can’t be underestimated.  There are the little things – like our Friday lunch buffet and the Voxeo café, which is staffed by a talented barista and stocked with an abundance of snacks.  Because we have fun together, there are company parties and family outings like our trip to the Kennedy Space Center and our annual 4th of July party. And because at least 80% of us (if not more) are techies, Voxeons rank the fact that employees are outfitted with the best equipment, including MacBook Pros and iPhones, high up on the list of benefits. So what’s at the top? For me it’s 100% paid healthcare for the entire family and the flexibility I need to successfully balance work and family.

So, while I wasn’t surprised about Voxeo making the list, I was incredibly excited and proud to see the company recognized for its efforts in cultivating a great workplace. The news is in the August issue of Florida Trend and online at www.FloridaTrend.com. Voxeo underwent a two-part selection process that included an evaluation of workplace policies, practices, philosophy, systems and demographics, as well as an employee satisfaction survey. The combined scores determined the top companies.

“Having started companies in Silicon Valley, New York, and Orlando, I know first-hand the great advantages Florida and its citizens offer to rapidly growing entrepreneurial companies,” said Jonathan Taylor, Voxeo’s CEO. “Voxeo’s philosophy is to attract and retain the brightest minds in Florida and to recruit talent to Florida from around the world. This award is particularly meaningful because it recognizes the talents and contributions of our employees — incredible people who make Voxeo a great place to work.”

Click here to read Voxeo’s press release or learn more about working at Voxeo.

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THE CLOUD MUST BE OPEN!

Can we say that any clearer? What is the point of running your applications “in the cloud” if you are locked-in to using a single cloud provider?

Here at OSCON yesterday, Tim O’Reilly stood onstage in his keynote and spoke about centralized services and databases and their “natural tendency toward monopoly“. He and others here continue to sound the alarm and warn that our increasing reliance on “the cloud” brings with it the danger of relying on cloud services that will simply lock us in to new proprietary systems and protocols.

We agree.

At Voxeo, we don’t think you should be forced to use a particular cloud telephony service simply because they are the only one who supports the protocol or language you want to use. When we launched Tropo.com back at eComm in March, this was one of our underlying concerns:

How do we prevent vendor lock-in for cloud telephony?

How do we make it so that our customers can develop their applications on Tropo.com, but yet have the freedom to take those applications and run them on some other provider’s service if they want to?

In looking at it, we saw the fairly obvious route that will no doubt seem radical to many:

We are making the Tropo.com source code available as open source. 

Yep… we’re opening the cloud. As our CEO Jonathan Taylor said (and yes, he actually did write this):

“Since 1999, Voxeo’s core mission has been to make telephony easy, effective and free of lock-in. We’ve been tearing down the walled gardens of telecom and replacing them with an open and accessible environment,” said Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo. “Nothing demonstrates this commitment better than Tropo’s completely open standards foundation and open-source availability. Unlike cloud vendors that use open-source but offer little back to the open-source community, we’re showing how cloud computing can be both completely open for end customers and concretely beneficial to open-source developers.” 

As both the news release and the post on our Tropo blog indicate, today marks the start of the process. We’ve made available two of the components that make up Tropo.com:

• Tropo SIP Servlet, which implements the Tropo core Java API for telephony applications and a mechanism to host a wide variety of programming languages on top of that API. The Tropo SIP Servlet is built on the Java SIP Servlet standard, JSR-289. SIP Servlet platforms are available from many vendors including Voxeo, Oracle, Avaya, and Redhat. The Tropo SIP Servlet uses another standard, the IETF’s MRCP standard to control audio interaction during calls. By open-sourcing this technology, we hope to support a wider variety of MRCP servers, and ultimately support any media platform that implements the Java Media Server Control API, JSR-309. 
• Tropo “Shims” for Groovy, JavaScript, Python, PHP and Ruby programming languages. Tropo Shims adapt the Tropo core API for use in a specific programming language. Open-sourcing these components enables Tropo to quickly support other programming languages. By releasing this code and working with the open-source telephony community, we hope to add support for additional programming languages such as Clojure, JavaFX, and Scala.

Over the coming weeks, Jason Goecke and Jay Phillips of our newly-announced Voxeo Labs team will release additional Tropo components that will allow you to run your own Tropo applications in private clouds, elastic computing services, or on your own servers in conjunction with Voxeo’s free Prophecy platform. Over the coming months, Voxeo Labs will work to support the widest variety of SIP Servlet and media server platforms, ultimately giving you a simple yet powerful telephony API that will work across the widest variety of platforms and vendors. Jason and Jay will be posting more information to the Voxeo Labs blog in the days and weeks ahead.

It’s all about having an open and interoperable cloud.

We’re excited about the possibilities – we hope you are, too. Will you join us now in bringing about open and interoperable cloud telephony?

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As you might know, we are doing monthly Jam Sessions on technical topics. The next session will come soon. On July 29th, 5:00 PM CEST, 11:00 AM EST, 8:00 AM PST, Andreas Volmer will talk about “Load and Regression Testing with VoiceObjects LoadTester”.

During this session, we will demonstrate the scope and functionality of the LoadTester, define test scripts, execute tests and inspect the results, providing you with the information you need to plan and conduct your own load and regression tests.

For more information, please visit our VoiceObjects developer portal.

Join us for this session!

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FYI, if you are going to be in New York City for the SpeechTEK show August 24 to 26, I’ll be speaking there on the topic of “Securing Cloud Telephony” on Monday, August 24, 2009. The abstract of the talk is:

As voice and self-service applications move increasingly into the cloud and to IP communications, what do you need to be concerned about with regard to the security of hosted solutions? If you grow to trust the cloud, how can you be sure it will be there for you? What protections can you put in place? What backup plans can you establish? What questions should you ask potential hosted/cloud vendors? In this session, security professional Dan York will walk you through the basic risk areas of voice-over-IP security, explain how those relate to both hosted and hybrid configurations and leave you with a concrete list of questions to consider in considering hosted/cloud options.

It should be a fun talk to give on a topic rather important these days.

P.S. And yes, the SpeechTEK list of sessions still uses my previous job title.

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We see it all the time – companies who deployed a standards-based voice application platform only to find out that they’re still locked in. How does that happen? After all, isn’t portability a key tenet of open standards?

Of course it is, but the fact is that your provider doesn’t want you going anywhere. To accomplish this, many vendors bundle proprietary tools that make it difficult to switch solutions should your requirements change down the road. Even standards-touting VoiceXML providers often use proprietary call control and VoiceXML tags to cleverly move lock-in from the platform level to the application level.

At Voxeo, we keep our customers by providing them with a better product and better support – never by locking them in. Voxeo offers the only VoiceXML browser to pass 100% of the VoiceXML Forum’s compliance test suite, including all optional tests, and the world’s most deployed CCXML browser. We support all of the secondary W3C voice standards and more SIP capabilities than any other vendor. Equally important, Voxeo strictly adheres to the principles behind open standards. The result is greater choice, unmatched flexibility, lower costs and true portability.

Since Voxeo’s customers own their intellectual property, they can switch providers, engage different development resources, or change their deployment model if requirements change.

With Voxeo you are free to:

• Move from hosting to a premise or hybrid deployment (or the other way around)
• Use your application development partner or VoiceXML development tool of choice
• Leverage the Voxeo VoiceObjects service creation environment to “design once and deploy anywhere.” VoiceObjects applications seamlessly work across all leading VoiceXML platforms and across multiple channels, including voice, IM, SMS and the mobile web. These phone channels can share the underlying dialog flow definition, business logic and back-end access, drastically simplifying development, maintenance, and reporting.
• Use your speech vendor of choice; Voxeo offers free built-in speech recognition and synthesis, as well as support for any MRCP-compliant engine
• Choose from a variety of TDM and VoIP carriers
• Run your application on any standards-compliant platform, including those of our competitors

If you are interested in learning more about Voxeo and our standards-based platform, contact us today.

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