Voxeo Talks

At ITEXPO back in January, Eric Linask at TMC interviewed me in what has seemed to become a regular every-six-months routine. In the interview, I discussed:

• the Cloud Communications Summit and pushing communications out into “the cloud”
• security issues related to cloud communications
• what’s next in communications, including multi-channel communications (a part of which we refer to as Unified Self-Service)

The big black vehicle behind me was being raffled off as part of the event promotion… hence why we were there. (Wouldn’t it perhaps have been more interesting if we did the interview inside the vehicle?) Anyway… here’s the video: (and will astute observers notice anything about me that is different from the other videos I’ve done?)

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On Monday, August 24th, at SpeechTEK in New York, I (Dan York) gave a talk called “Securing Cloud Telephony” with the abstract:

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.

My slides are now available here:

http://www.slideshare.net/voxeo/speechtek-2009-securing-cloud-telephony-aug2009

Given that SpeechTEK records all the sessions and sells the resulting CD, I doubt that I will be able to publish a recording of the talk. Perhaps at a future time I’ll be able to give a similar talk at conference that allows open recording/distribution… or maybe I’ll just have to do a webinar some time on the topic.

Technorati Tags: speechtek, slides, dan york, security, voip, voipsecurity

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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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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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I sadly heard the news that my former adviser, Prof. Rajeev Motwani, at Stanford University passed away on Friday in an accident.

During my graduate study at Stanford, I truly appreciated his willingness to reach out and help to off-campus students like me.

In recent years, Prof. Motwani has become well known among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs due to his early involvement in Google, Paypal, and other start-ups in the valley.

It is a huge loss to Computer Science at Stanford, and the industry as a whole.

My sincere condolence to his family.

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While Voxeo holds regular technical Jam Sessions for our VoiceObjects developer community, this month we’re really jamming with a special-edition session on the business advantages of personalization. With personalization, self-service applications can automatically adapt to individual preferences and recent transactions for an improved customer experience, lower costs and untapped revenue opportunities.

Industry veteran and VoiceObjects founder, Michael Codini, will talk about how you can:

• Delight callers with personalization
• Determine if your applications are meeting caller needs
• Learn from customer behavior
• Adapt applications on-the-fly based on customer preferences, recent transactions and more
• Deliver targeted offers
• Leverage investments in business intelligence

The online Jam Session will take place on Tuesday, June 16^th at 11:00 AM EST, 8:00 AM PST, 5:00 PM CEST.  You can register here.

Click here to learn more about our regular, monthly technical Jam Sessions.

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Over on the eComm blog, Lee Dryburgh has been doing a series of podcast interviews, for which he has also very nicely provided transcripts for people not wanting to listen to a 45-minute podcast, and one of Lee’s latest interviews is with Irv Shapiro, CEO of IfByPhone, on the subject of “Cloud Telephony”. It’s an interesting interview and one I’d recommend to readers.

If you’d like to meet Irv and other folks like him, please do consider attending eComm - Early Bird registration ends today!

P.S. And yes, IfByPhone has been a partner of ours for over a year and uses Voxeo technology within parts of their infrastructure… but regardless of that, I would still recommend the interview. IfByPhone is doing some great stuff to make voice apps very accessible to web developers.

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Technorati Tags: ecomm, ifbyphone, voxeo, mashups, voice, voip

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In about 3 hours, at 11am US Pacific / 2pm US Eastern, I (Dan York) will be participating in a “Hosted Speech Solutions” webinar sponsored by Speech Tech Magazine. I’ll be joining colleagues from Microsoft (TellMe), Angel.com and Convergys. We’ll be talking about each of our hosted offerings and then answering a series of questions before then throwing it open to questions from the audience.

If you would like to join in and learn about our solutions (and those of our competitors), you can register for free.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, dan york, danyork, speech, hosted, cloud, cloudcomputing, ivr, voice, voip

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Is the role of “voice” diminished or enhanced by the availability of web services? How does voice fit into the “cloud”? Where do service providers fit into the picture?

Out at ITEXPO last month in Los Angeles, industry analyst Jon Arnold asked me (Dan York) to participate in a series of video interviews he was recording for his IPConvergence.TV site. In the interview, which is now available for viewing, we talked about “voice-enabling” business processes, web services, “cloud computing”, the challenges to service providers and customers and much, much more. Jon also asked me to talk a bit about what I see ahead of us in the next few years. It was a fun interview to do and I appreciated the opportunity.

NOTE: There is no way to currently embed the video, so you’ll need to watch it over on TMC’s site. I’ll also note that on my Mac I couldn’t watch the video in Firefox but instead had to use Safari. Now this may be due to some local configuration issue on my system, but I thought I’d mention it.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, dan york, jon arnold, itexpo, commdev

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As I wrote about before, RJ, Jose and I were out at the Communications Developer Conference (co-located with ITEXPO) next week earlier this month in Los Angeles and our slides are now available for viewing. I also have audio and video that I will be making available soon.

Meanwhile, enjoy the slides. Note that if you click on links to go to the actual SlideShare pages you can also download the slides in PDF form.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2008

The State of SIP Application Development, 9:00-9:45am

Our CTO, RJ Auburn, led off our presentations as part of a panel on SIP application development:

As SIP continues to be implemented in enterprise and consumer environments, applications are being developed that further leverage the IP capabilities of the clients.

RJ spoke about the state of SIP-based voice application development and how it all fits in within the world of unified communications. He had some great demonstrations of using SIP via CCXML and also SIP Servlets to connect voice applications to Twitter.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2008

SIP Trunking and Security in an Enterprise Network, 10:15-11:15am

On this day, I (Dan York) put on my VoIP Security Alliance hat and joined a SIP trunking session sponsored by Ingate Systems:

Panel discusses security misconceptions, challenges and requirements in this evolving IP communications landscape from each presenter’s perspective.

It was a fun talk to give and covered the many aspects of VoIP security – with an obvious focus on SIP trunking.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

AJAX’s Impact on Telecom, 9:15-10:00am

Jose deCastro started off our day on Thursday with a presentation about how AJAX (“Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) has changed the way we can do telephony development:

AJAX has completely changed how developers approach the Web. A lesser-known and surprising phenomenon is AJAX’s impact on telecom and open telephony standards. This session will give the audience a brief history of speech technologies and how XML fits into the speech technology ecosystem. Jose will demonstrate how developers can apply their existing AJAX skills to build dynamic telephone applications, and why this development paradigm is ideal for telecom applications.

Jose has been the lead developer on our Designer product that lets developers easily build voice applications through a web/drag-and-drop interface and this talk was a great one, especially for web developers looking to add voice into their apps.

Developing Voice Applications in The Cloud, 10:15-11:00am

I was up right after Jose talking about the whole movement to push application functionality out into “the cloud”. Here’s my abstract:

Today the industry is buzzing about cloud computing and pushing applications out into the network cloud. Google has brought out their AppEngine platform while Amazon offers their EC2 and S3 services and Microsoft and others prepare their own offerings. In this session, attendees will learn about what is involved with developing voice applications on cloud computing platforms. What options are out there? What do you need to look for in a platform? How can you get started? The session will include demonstrations and prepare the attendees to return home and get started.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, voice, applications, voip, sip, sip applications, sip security, ajax, cloud computing, xml, itexpo, communicationsdeveloperconference

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