Voxeo Talks

Last week we posted 3 new job openings and we may have another one being posted soon… the magic page to watch is:

http://www.voxeo.com/about/jobs.jsp

If you click on the “Voxeo’s U.S. job listings at CareerBuilder.com” link, you’ll see that we have newly posted:

• Network Operations Center (NOC) Engineer
• Customer Support Engineer I
• Senior Technical Account Manager

The position for Network Security Manager we posted about earlier in November is still listed as well as we’re still interested in considering candidates.

Voxeo’s an amazing place to work with some rather incredible benefits… particularly with regard to health care. If you are interested in potentially becoming a “Voxeon“, follow our jobs link, sign into CareerBuilder and apply there.

Congrats to the team at Skype on the finalization of their sale from eBay last week and their new independence!

We’ve long been fans of Skype and have been a partner of theirs since back in 2005. As I’ve noted in previous blog posts, notably “Skype-ifying your voice applications“, we automatically provide an inbound Skype number to call any XML application you create on our Evolution developer portal or any JavaScript, PHP, python, ruby or groovy app you create on our Tropo.com cloud telephony service. (And here are instructions about how to find that number for Evolution and for Tropo.)

I wish the folks at Skype all the best as they transition back to being an independent company and look forward to continuing to work with them in the time ahead. Congrats, Skypers!

P.S. If you’d like to try this connectivity out yourself, just head on over to Evolution or Tropo.com and sign up for a free developer account.

When you see a buyer’s market out there, and you yourself are in a great financial position, doesn’t it make sense to seize the opportunity to grow further?

This morning we were very pleased to announce a $9 million (USD) strategic investement in Voxeo by North Atlantic Capital and the Florida Growth Fund. We’ve already seen some great coverage by the Orlando Sentinel, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and others. We’ll be tracking coverage on this news page:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/news/investment2009/

Given that we have been an employee-owned company since 2004, have been profitable and growing like crazy since that time (1,361% over the last five years!), and have turned down numerous investment requests over the years, the number one question we’ve been getting since word of the investment first started leaking out a few weeks ago has been …

Why now?

The best answer is perhaps the quote from our CEO Jonathan Taylor in today’s Orlando Sentinel article:

Taylor plans to reach those goals through an aggressive acquisition strategy that will bring in new customers and new employees, something the company has been doing since the recession began. He hopes to buy three of four companies next year by following a strategy that he compares with a deep-pocketed real-estate mogul attacking the housing market.

“There are a lot of people that want to or need to sell their company, but there’s not a lot of buyers,” said Taylor. “So if you are a buyer, you’re in a position to really get some great deals. That’s the single biggest reason why we decided to take this investment.”

The effects of the economy are easy to see out there. In our industry, some competitors are either going bankrupt or laying off many employees. Startups with innovative technology are struggling to survive.

Meanwhile, we’re growing, adding many more customers for both our hosted and premise services and have no need for the investment… but it made sense for us to take a minority investment to help us seize the opportunities out there. We are still employee-owned… we just now have a few friends helping us grow even further and faster!

Interested in learning about the advantages of hosted speech solutions versus on-premise solutions? Or why you should or shouldn’t have to choose? Want to understand the pros and cons of pushing voice applications out “into the cloud”? If so, please join us today at 2pm US Eastern time for a free webinar hosted by Speech Tech Magazine and including speakers from Voxeo, Angel.com, Contact Solutions and Nuance Communications. To sign up, please go to this URL:

http://www.speechtechmag.com/webinars/roundtable/12nov2009/vox2

Industry analyst Daniel Hong from Ovum (formerly Datamonitor and author of Datamonitor’s IVR short list report) will start the session with a market overview and the whole event is hosted by Speech Tech Magazine’s David Myron. Key questions to be discussed include:

• How the incentives built into a hosted agreement impact the customer’s long-term results;
• How the arrangement should be set up for you to realize maximum savings;
• The capabilities to look for when selecting a provider;
• The role of monitoring, reporting, and tuning;
• The role of caller behavior analysis;
• The impact of service-level agreements on performance, availability, and caller experience;
• The limitations when handling different interaction types, such as touch-tone, mobile, speech, and authentication/verification; and
• Integration with customer and third-party data/solutions to meet unique call requirements.

It should be an interesting collection of viewpoints given the mix of vendors. Again, it’s free, so please feel free to sign up and join us at 2pm US Eastern, 11am US Pacific. The session will also be archived for later viewing.

Are you a Java programmer looking for new challenges? Would you like to work for a dynamic company on the bleeding edge of communication technologies?

As noted in the US CareerBuilder link off of our Jobs page we now have an opening for a Java Engineer. The job description goes into great detail about the responsibilities and requirements, but the overview is this:

Voxeo is looking for a seasoned Java guru to work in a fast-paced customer-driven development environment. Ideal candidates will have a passion for crafting elegant solutions to meet constantly evolving business requirements. Voxeo is a deeply technical company all the way up to our CEO, and engineers play a critical role both in the creation of our products and the support of the developers that use those products. Engineers are provided with the tools necessary to do their jobs, as well as the freedom to select the best technologies to meet customer demands. In exchange they produce quality deliverables in a timely fashion and provide technical leadership throughout the company.

Again, the job description explains more of what we are seeking – and is also the way that you apply. We’ve got some great plans for the future and are looking for people who want to join in the action!

At VoiceCon SF 2009 last week in San Francisco, I (Dan York) spoke about “Developing Voice Apps Using Mashups and SOA“. In the talk, I discussed what voice “mashups” are, gave a couple of examples, and then went on to show one of the Tropo.com examples found on the documentation page – the specific one I showed was the Yahoo!Weather example in python. I logged into my Tropo.com account, created a new application, indicated that I wanted to use a hosted file, copied/pasted text from the example, and then set up a phone number and IM address.

You can do all this, too, since Tropo.com accounts are free.

Here are the slides I used in my voice mashups talk:

Are you a seasoned network security professional interested in being part of the bleeding edge of communications? Want to work with the largest SIP-based XML telephony infrastructure in the world? Do you know how to secure networks – and also technologies like VoIP / SIP? Do you want to be part of an amazing place to work?

If so, you might be a great fit for our Manager of Network Security position. Here is a brief bit of the description:

This position is responsible for providing technical leadership and accountability for the security strategy and architecture development/design and implementation for the Voxeo Production Environment

Responsibilities include leading the initiatives and programs that ensure continuous improvement of the security of Voxeo’s Production Environment. This position acts as the security expert and provides technical guidance and training to other personnel. This position enhances security in Voxeo’s Production environment by recommending, developing and delivering processes, practices, tools and metrics that support a secure environment.

This position is also responsible for providing leadership in analyzing security breaches and potential breaches, determining root cause and making recommendations for security improvements to the Voxeo Production Environment.

This position is responsible for insuring Voxeo maintains its PCI compliance and SAS70 compliance status. It is also responsible for the company’s Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and testing efforts.

More details and requirements can be found in the CareerBuilder job posting – which is also where you apply for the job.

Last week at eComm Europe, Voxeo Lab‘s Jay Phillips spoke on “Entrepreneurial Advantages with New Open-Source Technologies” and as usual providing an entertaining set of slides complete with LOLCats and other pictures that… well… make you think you kind of had to be there to understand! Along the way he outlined the state of a number of different open source telephony and communication tools… and made an announcement in the middle, too….

You can see Jay’s slides on SlideShare or here: