Voxeo Talks

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:

#7 Can the cloud keep up with innovation better that what you can deliver inside your enterprise?

Communications technology doesn’t stand still. Is the cloud communication provider you are considering keeping on the leading edge (or even the bleeding edge) of technology? Or are your enterprise data centers farther ahead that the cloud provider?

More to the point, when some new technology comes along, does the cloud provider have a history of rapidly making new technology available? Or can you make that new technology available faster on your own?

In my personal opinion, the cloud should be able to keep you on the leading edge of communication tech. This is to me one of the great strengths of the “cloud”… letting you play with new technologies and services, before you deploy them within your enterprise.

I’ll give you two examples from Voxeo’s history. Back in August 2009 when we added text messaging (SMS) and instant messaging (IM) to our hosted cloud, we made it so that with a change of a button within a web interface a voice app could also become a text messaging / IM app:

Beyond changing that button and confirming the application file you wanted to use for text messaging, that was all you had to do. The cloud just brought this capability to you.

Similarly, when we added support to Tropo.com back in March 2010 to create Twitter applications, it was again with a very simple addition of a web form:

Click the link, go through the Twitter OAuth process and… ta da… your application is now responding to Twitter messages!

That’s the kind of innovation the cloud should be able to deliver to you… and is something to consider in the “cloud vs premise” debate… can the cloud connect you with new innovative forms of communication faster and more reliably than you can do yourself?

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”!

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

If you have been watching our @voxeo Twitter account, you may have noticed a few references to a “@tropo” account… yes, indeed, we’ve decided to give our Tropo.com cloud communications service its very own Twitter account at:

http://twitter.com/tropo

If you are a Twitter user, please do follow the Tropo account to keep up on the latest changes and advances with Tropo.com. While you are at it, you may want to check out the Tropo Blog if you haven’t done so in a while, as Adam, Jason and others have been adding lots of great tips and tutorials lately.

P.S. And if you aren’t following @voxeo on Twitter, please do! We’d love to stay in touch with you that way…

Over at eComm Europe in Amsterdam yesterday, Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn did his characteristic stirring of the pot with a talk called The Rise of Real-Time Text and the Demise of Voice. The Twittersphere seemed to be quite amused by the CTO of a “voice” company saying this – an oft-twittered phrase was:

Voxeo is talking about text, not voice! Kids don’t talk on the phone, they text or IM. So the future is text.

To people reading this blog or any of our other blogs, these statements shouldn’t come as any real surprise. Today the way companies interact with customers definitely includes voice – and for ten years now we’ve helped over 100,000 developers, over 45,000 companies and over half the Fortune 100 deliver exceptional customer service over voice.

But any look at communications trends today – including our own usage as individuals – will show that we’re increasingly moving to a world in which voice is only one of the many channels that customers use to interact with you – and it may not be the preferred channel. It’s not just the fact that “Kids don’t talk on the phone” – it’s also that we as consumers/individuals don’t want to wait on the phone while a call center agent takes forever to look something up on a slow computer system. We want to multi-task… we want to get other things done. But yet sometimes we also want to just get a person on the phone.

From a Voxeo perspective, we call this “Unified Self-Service™” – the idea of developing one application and allowing customers to interact with that application through whatever communication channel they choose: voice, SMS, IM, Twitter, mobile web … whatever.

We’re not just talking about this, of course… we’ve made it real today… with our Prophecy 10 platform, with our IMified platform, with our VoiceObjects product… you can sign up for a free account in our Evolution developer portal and write a VoiceXML app that interacts with users via voice (from the PSTN, SIP or Skype), via SMS or via IM. Today. Now. It’s that simple. Or go over to Tropo.com and write your multi-channel app in JavaScript, Ruby, python, PHP or Groovy. One application – many channels.

You’ll obviously see us writing and speaking more about this topic in the weeks and months ahead. But rather than listen to us – dive in and try it out!

And in the meantime, check out RJ’s slides – they are done in RJ’s typical excellent style (and yes, he presented the 94 slides in under 15 minutes):

Are you a developer working with voice or communications applications in the San Francisco Bay area? Or will you be in SF next week for VoiceCon or Enterprise 2.0? Interested in learning more about “voice mashups”, cloud-based voice, “recombinant telephony” and other innovations?

We (Voxeo) are joining with Orange Labs for a special edition of Orange Spotlight focused on the coming “wave” of mashups involving cloud-based voice technology, innovations in messaging, and realtime web. On Wednesday evening, November 4th, we will be hosting a collection of developers and strategists working at the edge of the current art in hosted contact center, IVR, speech, and multimodal technologies who are all gathered for the purpose of sharing knowledge and inspiration. Some of the participants include:

• Thomas Howe of voice mashup fame
• Voxeo – Dan York and Jason Goecke
• Rebelvox – Tom Katis
• Ditech Networks – Jamie Siminoff
• LiveOps – Tony Simek

and many more. If you are a subject matter expert or have an active interest in the future of telephony, this will be an evening of interactive discussion on this exciting area. The event is from 5:30 – 8:00pm at Orange Labs’ facility in South San Francisco near the SFO airport.

Space is limited so please email me (Dan York) ASAP if you are interested.

Next week is a bit of a marathon speaking schedule for me (Dan York) out in San Francisco. VoiceCon and Enterprise 2.0 are co-located at the Moscone Center in downtown SF and I’m actually speaking at both events. Full details of my talks can be found on our event pages at:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/voicecon-san-francisco/
http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/enterprise-2-0/

The overall schedule looks like this:

Monday, Nov 2 (VoiceCon)

3:15 – 4:15 pm – Presence – Current Progress and Future Trends

Tuesday, Nov 3 (Enterprise 2.0)

11:15 am–12:00 pm – Case Studies In Enterprise Micro-Blogging

4:15 – 5:00 pm – The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise

Wednesday, Nov 4 (VoiceCon)

3:15 – 4:15 pm – Developing Voice Apps Using Mashups and SOA

Thursday, Nov 5 (VoiceCon)

8:00 – 9:45 am – Web 2.0 and Enterprise Communications – Fad or the Future?

I’m very much looking forward to both events, both to participating in the sessions I’m in and also to seeing all the other great sessions at both events.

In the Presence session on Monday, moderator Don Van Doren will be getting the panel involved in a discussion around what we need for truly making presence be more useful in an enterprise environment. (As to my involvement there, do recall that Voxeo has a product, SIPoint, which provides a SIP-based presence server among other services.)

On Tuesday, the first session on microblogging should be a good tour inside different ideas of taking Twitter-like microblogging inside the company, something I wrote about at some length in the past. The second session is a reprise of the “reactor” panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston earlier this year – only with different panelists. Should be a fun and interactive session.

Wednesday brings a session on voice mashups where I will be demonstrating what can be done with our Tropo.com platform and then a gentleman from IBM will be demonstrating mashups on their platform. And finally Thursday wraps up my participation with a almost two-hour “deep dive” into the role of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise with my frequent co-presenter Irwin Lazar.

All in all it should be a great event. (And add in speaking at an event on Wednesday night (more on that in another post) and… well… I think I’ll be tired by the time Friday rolls around! )

If you are going to be out at either VoiceCon or Enterprise 2.0, please feel free to say hello or drop me a note in advance. You can also expect that I’ll be tweeting throughout the time at both my own @danyork account as well as the @voxeo Twitter account.

Would you like to add SMS and IM interaction to your existing VoiceXML apps? Would you like access to new reports and analytics in Prophecy? This morning here at SpeechTEK 2009 in New York City, we announced Prophecy 10, the latest release of our Prophecy product, which includes all this and more. P10 is a huge release for us in our continued delivery of what we call “Unified Self-Service”, the ability to develop an application once and have users interact with that application via voice, SMS, IM, Twitter, and more. Prophecy 10 includes:

• SMS and IM Integration – Building on our IMified integration, Prophecy 10 allows you to take your existing voice applications and enable them to work with SMS or IM. When you login to our Evolution developer portal and look at the settings for an application, you will see that you can now add SMS and IM to any given application. This same capability has now been added to our Tropo.com cloud service as well.
• Comprehensive analytics – Utilizing the power of VoiceObjects Analyzer we have added 15 analytics reports directly into Prophecy 10, with the ability to access the full range of VoiceObjects Analyzer reports through simply adding the additional software module.
• Dramatic performance improvements – Every third release of Prophecy we take a moment to see what we can do to make it even faster and more powerful than it was before. We’ve done that in spades with P10, delivering the capability to run 100 ports of XML telephony on a very low-end netbook, up to 500 ports on a standard Windows or Linux server and up to 2,000 ports on a single high-end 64-bit server.

The news release goes into the full details and if you are here at SpeechTEK, you can stop by our booth #800 where you can see our demo of 20 Acer netbooks running Prophecy 10 in a 2,000 port cluster. It’s VERY cool stuff…. (and we’re giving away 10 of the netbooks as well!)

The early access release of Prophecy 10 is immediately available for download now for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Users of our hosted Evolution Developer Portal or Tropo.com will also see that they can start adding IM and SMS to existing applications right away.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, speechtek, sms, im, tropo

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?