Voxeo Talks

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?