RJ Auburn - One Step Beyond

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.

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 ;-)

Here is a copy of my presentation from cluecon about telephony 2.0…

Yesterday we (Voxeo) were finally able to announce our rocketsource.org project. This is going to be an umbrella project to help develop, promote and sponsor open source phone applications. To date this has been a giant weakness as there are very few complete applications available that people can just download and start using.

So far we have released 3 applications that are complete and ready to go. We have Voice Conference Manager from Moshe Yudkowsky. And then we have Vox-Attendent and Vox-Mail from Shawn Rhoads.

We are planning on sponsoring more applications over the coming months. If you have something you would like to contribute to or sponsor please drop us a line at cosmonauts@rocketsource.org.

It looks like the press has started writing about Prophecy. Robert Poe from VoIP Magazine seems to be the first one to release an article to the public:

* Voxeo Brings Cheap Voice Response into the Enterprise

I recently came across a few new blogs on the net relating to speech and IVR. VoIP Soup seems to have just started the other day but looks to be promising. Voice Technologies in Government also looks to have a lot of useful information on it.

Tom Keating posted a entry today on ENUM that is a good overview of where deployments are in the US. I agree with him 100% that ENUM is going to be the direction that everyone moves to over the next few years as the PSTN evolves from it’s legacy form to the next generation version that is a mix of both circuit switching and VoIP. It’s exciting to see everyone start to converge on it as the solution.

Companies are currently using private ENUM trees for deployment (We have been using it here at Voxeo since 2000 for our hosted network) and I think they will stick around for some time even when the public ENUM tree’s start getting some traction in the US.

I would definitely recommend giving the posting a read.

Today Voxeo and Paraxip announced a partnership where we will provide our Voxeo Voice Center platform integrated with the Paraxip Open Gateway VoIP solution.

Paraxip will also be offering our CCXML engine as part of their standalone gateway product, bringing a new level of call control features to the VoIP gateway market.

Just in case you have not looked at the Paraxip solution before it’s a software based VoIP gateway that uses traditional Dialogic cards for the telephony interface. What it brings to the table is a level of flexibility for IVR type features that some of the other gateway providers just can not match. well worth a look if you have not seen their stuff before.

As I promised during todays session on CCXML and SIP at the TMC VoIP Developers conference here are the slides from todays session. Enjoy!

This just in, the Asterisk PBX now has MacOSX Support! I will have to give this a try when I get back from the VoIP developers conference.

ComputerTelephony.org recently launched a new blog titled SpeechBlog that is going to be covering the telephony and speech space. Sadly there are not that many blogs covering the speech space yet but with any luck as the market is growing we should start to see a few more sources of conversation on the web.

There seems to be a lot of exciting stuff going on with open source projects and SIP lately. I attended a session at VON that covered some of the projects that are out there and I wanted to share some of my thoughts on them here.

The big news of course has been that PingTel is open-sourcing all their IP PBX software including their SIP stack and softphone. They plan to have all of their stuff up at sipfoundry.org on April 15th. Overall it looks like there should be some very interesting code that will be made available including some various media processing libraries and integration with the OpenVXI project.

The other open-source sip stack that looks interesting is reSIProcate. It’s a pretty new stack on the scene but seems to support some of the leading edge SIP drafts and features including TLS/SSL.

And of course you could not forget Asterisk the Linux PBX. Their booth at VON was full of people who wanted to take a look at how well it worked. I expect that more and more people are going to getting involved in this project as it really seems to be taking off.

On the Java side there seems to be a good amount of activity going on over at java.net. They are currently hosting a number of JAIN SIP open-source projects including a SIP location proxy server and various soft phones. Sadly on the RTP front there still has not been a lot of progress. The only real RTP solution is JMF and based on my own experience and from everyone that I have talked to it seems way too clunky and does not scale well at all. I really hope that sun gets something going here one way or another. If not I think it’s something that some open source project may want to take on.

I just finished moderating a panel at VON titled “Media Servers and SIP” and it was amazing to see the attendance. The room had at least 100 people attending and it was standing room only. Talking to the panelists they told me they were all shocked at the interest level in the room. They have done panels covering media servers in the past and this is the first time there was a good level of excitement in the room and by far the largest attendance.

As Jeff Pulver has said recently the turnout at VON this year is great. I spent most of the day yesterday at the show and it’s been great to see so many exhibitors out there on the floor and a lots of attendees. Sadly I was not able to make the conference party last night as I was loosing my voice and am just trying to finish recovering from a cold but I’m sure it was a complete blast.

Based on this InfoWorld article it looks like Deutsche Telekom is going to be joining the recent crowd of big name telcos in offering broadband VoIP to consumers. No date for release yet but it’s looking like VoIP is going to hit mass market in the next year or two at the most.

The speechsc group just published another draft of the MRCPv2 spec. It’s nice to see it moving along within the group so well. I am looking forward to seeing some vendors add support for it!

A big congratulations are in order for Jeff Pulver and the rest of the Free World Dialup team. The FCC just approved(PDF) their petition that will help keep Voice over IP free of regulation in the US.

There has been a lot of talk in the industry on regulation of VoIP in the last few months. InfoWorld just had a story on this covering comments made by Jeffrey Citron the CEO of Vonage.

Jeff Pulver has covered this many times and his Petition for his Free World Dialup network is going to be reviewed by the FCC on February 12th.

These next few months are going to be very interesting as the regulation of this gets sorted out.

The folks in the IETF SpeechSC group have recently published the second draft of the MRCPv2 protocol. If you have not looked at MRCP for a while it might be worth reviewing it again. The original MRCP protocol was RTSP based and while folks are now starting to implement it adding RSTP support to platforms was a hurdle that some folks did not want to jump. The new version is SIP based and as most platforms out there now support or will support SIP this will make implementation easer.

I will be moderating a panel on SIP and the Media Server at the Spring VON show this year. There has been a lot of progress in the last few years here and I think it should be exciting to hear from several companies and experts talk about the different products and standards that are now available.

It looks like there is going to be a great turnout this year and the exhibit hall has sold out for the first time in a few years. While Voxeo will not have a booth there this year I should be cruzing around the show so be sure to say hi if you are there.