RJ Auburn - One Step Beyond

This posting on crappy enterprise software outlines so much of why I hate the status-quo and why when we started work on Prophecy that our goal was to make it as easy to use as shrink wrap software. It’s not that you would ever go into bestbuy and pick up an IVR platform but for the love of god it should not ship on 8 CD’s and require an expert to show up on your doorstep for a week to get it up and running.

Now while I think we have done a pretty good job in making Prophecy the easiest IVR platform on the market we think there is a lot more that can be done in the space. One of the mantra’s around our office is “how could we make this easer?”. It’s the question we try to ask ourself time and time again as we try to reach closer to our goal of killing off the quacking cow.

This week I am happy to welcome Dan York to the Voxeo team. Dan will be working for me in the Office of the CTO and will be focusing on emerging communication technology trends and helping out with representing Voxeo in the standards organizations like the IETF. Dan is an expert in the VoIP security space and has been an active VoIP blogger for several years now. Previously he worked in the Office of the CTO for Mitel.

Dan has a nice post about starting at Voxeo over on his Disruptive Telephony blog. If he’s not already in your newsfeed I would definitely take a moment and add him to your list.

Being a Mac user currently I need to put up with VMWare or Parallels in order to run Prophecy our premise IVR platform (At least until Prophecy 9 is released). For the most part everything works perfectly except for our SIP phone when running under VMWare Fusion. Sadly this one problem was really really nasty because it would cause the entire VM to crash leaving your VM config and disk file locked and required manual work to recover from. Our engineers had been unable to pinpoint what the problem was other then it was being triggered by some of the sound card tricks we have to do to make g711 ulaw play correctly on windows without occasional blips (thats another story for another day). We have sent bug reports off to VMware but never heard anything back about what the problem might be. For long longest time now I just put up with using SJPhone on the Mac side and avoiding the SIPPhone inside windows.

Anyway, today I decided to try the VMWare Fusion 1.1 beta build and I was thrilled to find out that it looks like this bug is fixed. I managed to place about 30 calls without having any problems when before it was would lock up about 1 in 4 times. Anyway, this release is highly worth downloading if you have struggled with this problem on a Mac.

The latest news today seems to be that Avaya is offering a “free” IP-PBX. In this case it’s not really free as much as they are offering 0% financing lease on their entry level PBX systems. Cute, even if it is somewhat misleading.

Anyway it’s interesting to see how some of the larger players are working to adapt to the new market where they can no longer sell phone systems that cost 5-6 figures out of the box for a basic starter system.

We certainly understand the value of making new technology easy to access to the small business. Thats why with Prophecy our premise IVR platform we have always offered free (really!) 2 port licenses that never expire and an easy up front pricing model for people who are looking to get started. Heck you can download set it up and buy it online in less then 10 minutes without ever having to talk to a person! Of course if you really want to talk to us we are always there 24×7 incase anything ever goes wrong.