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.

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.

CellTell.tv recently created a nice Telephony 2.0 application that shows exactly what I have been talking about with regards to where we need to be going in the telephony world.

Celltell.tv is a phone interface to the popular backpack web service from 37 signals. In case you have not heard of backback it is a very nice web based personal organization program. It manages todo lists, calendars, notes and just about anything else using a very simple web interface and has some great hooks into e-mail and a open developer API for extending it.

What CellTell has done is added way to create voice notes for your pages simply by placing a phone call to a VoiceXML application. When you call in and leave a message the recording is automatically uploaded to the backpack service allowing you to listen to the content when you are back at the computer. They support accessing it via toll free numbers, local numbers both in the US and the UK and skype.

This is just another of the ten’s of thousands of applications that have been created on Voxeo’s Evolution developer program. Anyone want to guess as to if we would have seen this service if people had to write low level C code modules instead of simple XML to make this work? Think of what the world would be like if you had to write an apache module for every web application! mod_rjauburncom anyone? ;-)

Voxeo will be at Speechtek next week in New York City. A number of us will be speaking on different panels and sessions. If you want to catch us drop by one of the following:

• I will be co-hosting a day-long tutorial on CCXML (Thurs Aug 10, 8:30a-4:30p).
• I will also be presenting in the Open Source Summit (Tues Aug 8, 11a-12:30p).
• Voxeo will be on a panel entitled “Strategic and Management Insights: Hosted Speech: Is it Right for You?” (Thurs Aug 8, 2:00p-3:30p).
• Marketing VP John Hibel will speak at the VOX conference on “What To Feed the 80 Pound Gorillas: Strategies for SMEs” (Mon Aug 7, 3:15p–4:00p).
• Voxeo VP and VoiceReady founder John Amein will be hosting a workshop on the Evolution Designer application development and management tool (Tues Aug 8, 3:00p-4:00p).

If you can’t make any of the above sessions make sure to stop by booth 705 and say hi. Rumor has it we will have something cool to give away again this year ;-)

You have got to check out this great phone application created by one of the developers on Voxeo’s evolution developer site. It’s a cute little app that people call to make mad lib style poems.

This is the exact kind of thing I was talking about yesterday at cluecon. When people start being to make really simple phone applications without knowing low level telephony you are going to see a lot more web type content out there. This is a great example of what Telephony 2.0 needs to look like.