Voxeo Talks

Are you going to be at Enterprise Connect next week in Orlando? “Enterprise Connect” is the new name of “VoiceCon”, reflecting the fact that enterprises no longer use just voice for their communication (Hmmm… seems like a theme I’ve heard somewhere before ) and it looks like it will be quite a great event.

While Voxeo will not have a booth on the exhibit floor, I (Dan York) will be speaking in two sessions and meeting with folks around the event.

First up, on Monday, February 28th, I’ll be giving a three-hour tutorial introducing attendees to the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). I gave this session last year and it was a great bit of fun and I had great feedback from the folks there. This year I’m going to add in some demos and other examples which should make it even more interesting and interactive.

Next on Wednesday, March 2nd, I’ll be on what should be a fun panel talking about the future of open source in communications technology. The moderator is analyst and blogger Dave Michels and the two other panelists are Thomas Howe of voice mashup fame and Kevin Fleming of Digium/Asterisk. The four of us are all frequent participants in the conference circuit and we work together well … and engage in… um… “dynamic” dialogue. (Translation: we aren’t afraid of interrupting each other or asking each other questions.) It should be fun and give some good insight into where open source is going in communications.

I’ll be tweeting out on both @danyork and @voxeo and will be around the show. I’ll also have my video gear there and will be recording interviews for my Emerging Tech Talk video podcast. I’ll be trying out a new monopod for my video camera, too, to see if I can reduce some of the movement. Got some good folks lined up already… should be fun. (And I’m always open to other ideas for interviews.)

If you are going to be at Enterprise Connect and you’d like to meet up, please do drop me an email or hit me on Twitter, Facebook or wherever we might be connected. See you there!

Continuing the series of questions coming out of our webinar, “Best Practices in Deploying Communication Applications: Cloud vs On-Premises vs Hybrid“, let’s ask the question:

#5 Can you get IP communications (ex. SIP) for rich integration into your infrastructure?

This is a key question to ask any cloud communications service – can you interact with the platform entirely over IP communications? Typically using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) or another VOIP protocol.

Here’s an example of why this is important… say you have a contact center and when people are finished talking to an agent you want to offer them the chance to take a customer survey. If they agree, they will be transferred over to the application running the survey. In the old legacy way of doing transfers, the contact center would just do a basic transfer over the PSTN to the phone number of the application….

WITHOUT any real context

No information about what the caller was talking to the contact center about… or what path they took through the contact center software… or how long they waited… or who they spoke with…

With the PSTN, there’s no real way to provide any of that rich context information – unless the contact center software perhaps appends a few extra digits… or calls a separate application for each possible work flow. Sure, there are creative ways to compensate… but they require a good bit of extra work and potential duplication… all to make up for the fact that the PSTN has no way to pass more than just basic information.

On the other hand, over in the IP communications space you can pass all sorts of headers rich in contextual information from the contact center software over to the application running in the cloud. The app can then deliver a very customized experience that, in the case of a survey, can really ask about the experience the person had. It’s personalized… customized… all because the application can get the rich headers from the original software.

What’s even better, the app running in the cloud can send all that information very easily back to the originating software so that that info can be passed back into the systems there.

So can the cloud talk SIP? If it can pass SIP headers back and forth, there’s an amazing amount of deep integration you can do. If the cloud can’t do SIP? Well, better let that one drift on by…

Last week at VoiceCon Orlando 2010, I was a panelist on two sessions and gave a 3-hour SIP tutorial. Two of those sessions involved slides and I’ve now uploaded those to our SlideShare account.

First up was the “Securing Communications” session where I provided this set of slides to help set up the discussion that followed:

The next day, I gave my 3-hour tutorial on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and used this set of slides:

My final session on Presence was discussion-only without slides.

If you are attending VoiceCon this week in Orlando, Voxeo’s Dan York will be speaking in 3 sessions at the event:

• Securing Communications, 45-minute panel, today at 3:15pm
• SIP Fundamentals and Prospects, 3-hour tutorial, Tuesday 2-5pm
• Challenges in Achieving the Promise of Presence, 45-minute panel session, Wednesday 3pm

More information is on our VoiceCon event page.

If you are at VoiceCon and would like to meet up with Dan, you can contact him via email or send him a message on Twitter as @danyork

If you will be attending the JavaOne Conference next week stop by The Moscone Center to hear RJ talk about how to build voice mashups with SIP Servlets or just to say hello, we know he is such a social butterfly!  This will be a 60 minute presentation titled “Taking a SIP of Java™ Technology: Building Voice Mashups with SIP Servlets” beginning at 9:45 am in room Esplanade 301.  The abstract of the presentation is:

The Java world has seen more then its fair share of telephony APIs come and go over the years. Things like JAIN SIP, JTAPI, Parlay, JAIN SLEE have been showing up on product road maps for several years now but SIP Servlets (now just released as a 1.1) are now finally seeing some industry wide adoption in application servers both closed and open source. Companies such as IBM     (WebSphere), Redhat (jboss), Sun (glassfish), Oracle, HP and Voxeo (sipmethod) have all recently added support for this standard.

SIP Servlets provide a simple API that mimics the widely deployed HTTP Servlet model allowing for java developers to easily adapt their existing code and framework for communication applications.

This session will provide a short introduction to sip servlets, why developers should pay attention and show people how they can    quickly create a converged application using the technology.

We will also show how you can quickly plug into simple web APIs using SOAP and REST to create quick web mash-ups.

Concluding the session will be information for the attendees to find out more about the technologies discussed and info on what they can do to download and build applications themselves.

This will be a great presentation you won’t want to miss.  You can register here or drop a note to coordinate a meeting outside of the conference.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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