Voxeo Talks

More companies are taking customer service to the cloud — from inbound and outbound IVR to two-way text to mobile web interactions.

• Is hosting your speech self-service solutions the right choice for your business?
• How will the solution scale to support additional communication channels?
• What are the important capabilities to look for in a vendor?

Join Chrysalis and Voxeo on Wednesday, June 22, for an educational webinar featuring Daniel Hong, Ovum Lead Analyst. Daniel will present findings from their new 2011 report, “Selecting a Provider of Cloud-based Speech Self-Service Solutions in North America.”

All webinar attendees will receive a complimentary copy of the new report – a $2,500 value.

Please join us:

Wednesday, June 22, 2011
10:00 AM US Pacific, 1:00 PM US Eastern, 7:00 PM Central European.

If you are unable to attend live, a recording of the session will be available later, but please register in advance to receive a free copy of the report.

Image credit: danyork

Did you miss our Best Practices webinar back in February on “Best Practices in Deploying Communication Applications: Cloud vs On-Premises vs Hybrid“? If so, we have a recording available on the webinar page, but now we also have the webinar available up on our YouTube account:

Our YouTube account was recently approved for the posting of videos longer than 15 minutes, so we’ll be adding our other webinars and jam sessions there as well.

The beautiful part about uploading our videos to YouTube is that they are now available across many different formats… including being available to mobile devices like the iPhone or iPad.

I hope you enjoy this Best Practices webinar… and we look forward to bringing you many more presentations through YouTube.

After the great discussion we had in our webinar this week, “Best Practices in Deploying Communication Applications: Cloud vs On-Premises vs Hybrid“, I thought I would expand on the questions that I included at the end of the webinar. So I’ll start with a series of posts about 7 questions to think about when considering a cloud solution versus an on-premise solution. These aren’t all the questions you should think about… but they are some good ones to get you started.

First up, let’s start with:

#1 Can the cloud offer better capabilities than what you can deliver in your enterprise?

Ultimately, this is the key question, right? Can the cloud do more for you than what you can do yourself?

If you already have a world-class, carrier-grade infrastructure with network security, geographic redundancy, etc, well… you are pretty much running your own “cloud”, and so a premise solution may be just fine for you. (subject to the other questions in this series) Some key considerations for running telecommunications in your own datacenters include:

• Do you have enough connectivity to the PSTN?
• Do you have redundancy in PSTN providers?
• Do you have “burstability” to handle spikes in traffic?
• Do you have 24×7 monitoring of all your telecom equipment?

For many companies, the answers in 2011 are that the cloud can very often provide better capabilities than the company can in its own data centers… but again, “it depends“.

The key is that you need to map out what capabilities you need to deliver your communications services… and then use that as a checklist when comparing cloud versus premise solutions.

As I said in the webinar, it’s very common for us to see applications start out in the cloud because there are so few barriers to get started (especially when we let you get started for free). As applications – and companies – grow, we see many of them stay in the cloud all the way, but some migrate to premise installations as companies take on more of their own infrastructure. Then, perhaps ironically, we see a migration back to the cloud as companies reach a larger size and decide they don’t want to run their own infrastructure.

Given that we offer both cloud, premise and even hybrid options (and do so for free to developers), we don’t really care which way you choose. You need to match the choice you make with the capabilities you need and that you may or may not already have.

If you missed our webinar yesterday on “Best Practices in Deploying Communication Applications: Cloud vs On-Premises vs Hybrid“, fear not… you can now watch the recording of the webinar and view the slides. Both are available on the web page for the webinar. It was a fun and very interactive session with lots of great questions.

And stay tuned for more “Best Practices” webinars coming in the months ahead. You can always visit:

blogs.voxeo.com/bestpractices

to get the latest info – or simply follow us on Twitter or Facebook. And if you have suggestions for future topics you would like to hear us cover, please feel free to email me.

Will you be down in South Beach, Miami, Feb 2-4, to attend ITEXPO, the Cloud Communications Summit, the SIP Trunking / UC Seminars or Digium/Asterisk World?

If so, Mark Headd and I (Dan York) will be on hand to speak in a number of different sessions, including:

• TOWN HALL MEETING: SIP, UC and Security
• Asterisk + Adhearsion + Tropo: Building AGI Applications in the Cloud
• TOWN HALL MEETING: Unified Communications
• Dark Clouds : Can you trust the cloud? Latency, Security and Availability
• Cloud Communications, State of the Art

Plus one other developer-focused talk Mark will be speaking in but for which we’re still waiting the final time and title.

We’re both looking forward to meeting up with a number of folks down there. If you’d like to meet with us at the show, please drop me an email or send one of us a message on Twitter: @danyork or @markheadd

P.S. And yes, I’m also looking forward to getting a chance to spend some time with Mark since we haven’t met face-to-face since he joined Voxeo in November…

As you may have read on GigaOm last night, Voxeo Gobbles Up Teleku, we announced that Voxeo acquired Teleku, a cloud communications startup. We have a news page up summarizing the announcement, linking to a FAQ and providing other info:

blogs.voxeo.com/news/teleku/

I sat down with Teleku founder Chris Matthieu to talk about the news:

We are delighted to welcome Chris to the Voxeo family and we’re very much looking forward to what he’ll bring to Tropo and Voxeo Labs. I know he’s already hard at work with the team on some truly disruptive new services! (Stay tuned!)

Personally, I’m also excited for Chris to join us as he brings solid content creation skills in writing blog posts, creating video screencasts and recording audio podcasts. Look for his contributions to begin appearing soon (mostly over on The Tropo Blog).

Welcome, Chris, to the fun and crazy world of being a “Voxeon”!

Have you wanted to easily create an application that communicates with your customers via voice, SMS/texting, instant messaging, Twitter and more? (what we call  Unified Self-Service) Have you looked at our VoiceObjects product but didn’t have an easy way to deploy the required on-premises server?

Today we are pleased to announce that we are making the ability to create multi-channel self-service applications simpler than ever with the release of VoiceObjects On-Demand.

No more need to have your own VoiceObjects server.  Simply download the desktop client and start building applications!  What you get is:

1. Instant startup.
2. Instant expansion.
3. Zero hardware costs and affordable pay-as-you-go pricing.
4. Full control over application integration and lifecycle management with no vendor lock-in.
5. Mission-critical infrastructure including multi-site redundancy, business continuity, and proven scalability.
6. Direct access to Voxeo’s world-wide hosted VoiceXML IVR platform, deployed in seven sites around the world.
7. Direct access to Voxeo’s high-quality, inexpensive speech recognition capabilities in 40 languages.
8. Direct access to other Voxeo features including encrypted call recording and SIP VoIP connectivity.
9. Connectivity to existing on-premise VoiceXML IVR platforms from Avaya, Cisco, Genesys, Intervoice, and more.
10. Voxeo’s unmatched 100% uptime SLA including 24×7 support and guaranteed 20 minute responses.

Oh… and did I mention that it is free to get started?

Don’t take my word for it, though, head on over to this page and check it out yourself:

http://www.voxeo.com/vo-ondemand

You can also watch this video introduction:

We’re very excited to have this new service available… and we’re looking forward to seeing what you all build with it!

Want to meet some of the folks on the bleeding edge of communication? Want to learn about new ways to build communication apps in the cloud? Or about the new technology available for communications and telephony? Or do you just want to meet a great group of people?

As mentioned over on the Tropo Blog, Voxeo is one of the sponsors of the San Francisco Telephony Meetup happening tomorrow, Wednesday, June 30th, at Orange Labs in South San Francisco.

Zhao Lu from Orange Labs and creator of OpenVoice has organized the San Francisco Telephony Meetup and the first meetup has a great agenda:

Gabriel Sidhom CTO, Orange Labs – Introduction

Jason Goecke, VP of Innovation at Voxeo Labs, will talk about Tropo & Moho – An open-source cloud communications platform that helps developers to create multi-channel real-time communications apps from the cloud or on your own open-source instance.

Adrian Georgescu, CEO of AG Projects Introduction to SIP2SIP.info
- Free SIP accounts for the masses
- Self-organizing SIP server infrastructure
- Remote provisioning API based on SOAP/XML

Chris Matthieu, the Founder of Teleku.com, will introduce the new cloud communication start-up’s RESTful web service APIs which allow web developers to write sophisticated phone applications using PhoneML, TwiML, or VoiceXML that run on any carrier’s network as well as their own free open-souce telephony stack called Ninja.

Dan Miller (Opus Research, 10min), Opus Research: Intro to Recombinant Communications (RC), what it is and what opportunities it presents to developers, incumbent carriers, wireless enterprise IT/app managers.

James Li/Dominic Lee (Orange Labs) – What else can you do while watching TV

Darren Schreiber (15min): an open-source, distributed cloud platform for putting distributed FreeSWITCH nodes on disparate servers. It’s written in Erlang mostly and utilizes some cool messaging and data storage technologies, including NoSQL.

A handful of Tropo people will be on hand, including Adam Kalsey, Jason Goecke, and John Higgins. RSVP on meetup.com and come join us.

June 30, 2010 at 6:30pm
Orange Labs
801 Gateway Blvd Suite 500
South San Francisco

Out at eComm in San Francisco today, Voxeo customer Ringio launched their cloud communications service that gives small and medium businesses the kind of positive customer calling experience you would expect out of a much larger company. I like how this Information Week article explains Ringio:

Just because SMBs can’t afford enterprise-class call center technology doesn’t mean that they don’t have call-center needs every bit as complex as large corporations. Moreover, with smaller customer bases and less entrenched brand recognition, the quality of customer care that SMBs provide, potentially, can have a bigger impact on the bottom line. Bringing the CRM and telephony functionality that enterprises take for granted to SMBs is the premise of the Rich Calling service announced today by Ringio.

Ringio’s news release gives a bit more context for their “Rich Calling Service” and how they see it helping SMBs provide a better customer experience.

I had a chance to interview Ringio CEO Sam Aparicio and in the resulting video you can see in the demo both how easy it is to set up and also what it can do for both the business and customers.

From a caller perspective, I was:

• Given a personalized greeting (you can hear that in the video);
• Promptly connected to someone at the company.

From the company perspective, when my call came in, Sam:

• Received a screen pop with my contact info, recent calls and conversations and other notes. This allows him to very easily see what I’ve been doing and why I might be calling. (In the age of Twitter, I could see one of the links being to someone’s Twitter page where I could simply look at that to see their recent activity.
• Was able to perform basic call functions like Hold and Transfer;
• Was able to see the presence of other people connected to the system and thereby be able to figure out who would be available to take the call;
• Write notes about the call.

Now, sure, you can do this in other premise CRM systems, but this is all out in the cloud and able to be managed through a web interface or through a mobile interface. Ringio has a nice “tour” page that explains how their service is “Far More Than a Small Business Phone System”.

It’s simple and easy to try out… you just have to go do www.ringio.com and sign up…

And if you want to watch Sam and I talking about the service, here’s the video (where he also talks about how Voxeo’s platform is used by the service):

We congratulate Ringio on their launch and look forward to their success!

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?)