Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Angel.com is a new breed of hosted VoIP service provider. They don’t provide hosted business telephony service, but rather they provide a hosted IVR capability.  With Angel.com, any business, large or small, can deploy sophisticated voice applications, ranging from simple auto attendents, to credit card processing, database systems, call centers, outbound IVR and more.

Following the Voice 2.0 conference on Monday,  Angel.com VP Sam Aparicio dropped by the iotum offices to discuss his solution with us.  What impressed me the most about his business was this:

1. They’ve built a sophisticated, but easy to use, front end for creating IVR applications.  Form based, it allows anyone, from novice to expert, to create an application.  Once complete, it generates VoiceXML which can then be run, or customized further by a VoiceXML jockey.  It provides the right balance between the complete flexibility of VoiceXML, and the usability required to get people running quickly.
2. They’ve clearly thought through the implications of Voice 2.0 architectures also.  For instance, applications are extensible through web services interfaces for mash-ups with other network services.  Moreover, Angel.com itself exposes a web services interface, so that remote applications (like iotum, for instance) can manipulate the call path directly, allowing for the creation of many kinds of solutions using Angel.com to originate and terminate calls.
3. The business model is designed to target even the smallest businesses. Built on the Nuance platform, Angel gives tiny businesses access to very sophisticated capabilities.  For a low (sub $100) monthly fee, even a 5 person travel agency can have a high end call management solution, with advanced speech services.  Angel provides the DIDs, and application platform.  You just tell it where to terminate the calls.

Angel.com is a poster-child Voice 2.0 company.  A hosted solution, with XML based web services interfaces, and a programmability model designed to attract the long tail of voice solutions, they are also a terrific success story. With 1600 customers today, and over 10,000 applications running on their platform, they’re living proof of the viability of Voice 2.0 businesses.

Thanks for dropping by, Sam. 

For the last few weeks I’ve been learning about Communigate and their products at a pretty mad rate. I was introduced to them by the folks at Versature, who have been using Communigate for some time as the foundation for their services. Communigate is one of the unsung stories of the VoIP world. From their origins as a provider of very robust and scalable email systems, they have expanded into a full featured application server for unified and real time communications. To give you an idea of what I mean, their solution combines email, calendar, IM, and SIP-based telephony in a single package that can scale from just a few users to millions. It’s well integrated, with presence accurately reflected to all subscribers whether the watcher be a telephone, IM, or email client. In short, it’s the realization of a lot of the vision which many much larger companies have spoken of for many years now.

Yesterday, Communigate announced Communigate Pro 5.1. This latest release includes:

Communify – A full-featured messaging client based on Flash technology and the XIMSS interface (XML API). Billed as a messaging client, Communify is really a dashboard for email, collaboration, IM and RSS feeds.

Communifon – A built-in softphone is also included. This is a modified version of the SJPhone product which has been around for sometime. SJPhone always had great voice quality, but was a bit of a bear to setup. Communigate tells me they’ve addressed this.

A built in spam filter is also an option.

XIMSS – an XML Interface for Messaging, Scheduling and Signalling. The impact of this component will be substantial. XIMSS transforms CommuniGate Pro into a web application server, allowing providers to extend and develop new light-weight web applications that integrate with CommuniGate Pro 5.1. For instance, Communify is built on XIMSS. Communigate claims that no other native messaging server provides such a rich array of open applications and published APIs.

IPv6 support – IPv6 provides support for next-generation IP networks, increasing the number of available IP addresses and is required for mobile and IMS compatibility. It allows CommuniGate Pro to be fully IMS interoperable for mobile connectivity, while serving both IPv4 and IPv6 networks simultaneously.

Telnum and ENUM support is now also included.

XMPP (the Jabber protocol) – XMPP support will drive interoperability between SIP and XMPP users around the world, and enable CommuniGate Pro users to IM with users on different IM networks, such as Google Talk®.

Sophisticated calendar views in webmail – CommuniGate Pro v5.1 provides new, advanced calendar views for collaboration via webmail. This is a welcome addition. Calendaring was weak in previous products

I had an opportunity to speak with Thom O’Conner, Communigate’s CTO a couple of weeks ago. His ambition is to “sipify” the world. Like many SIP visionaries, Thom would like to see real time communications addresses (ie. voice, video, etc) be consistent with email. You should be able to call me using sip:alec@iotum.com, for example. The difference, however, is that Thom is actually in a position to make this happen. Because every application in Communigate is so tightly integrated with every other, Communigate users are contactable using a SIP address, or a standard DID. It’s a welcome step toward the Voice 2.0 vision of a unified identity scheme.

Part of their vision, as has been made clear with this release, is to engage a community of software developers to build applications around Communigate Pro. In order to facilitate this, they will be offering:

• A Community Edition. Targeted at individuals and developers, this is a free download of their software restricted to five users. You can go get it, and play with it to your heart’s content.
• A Community Web Site, to facilitate the exchange of information, and to make it easy for customers and other users to tap into the growing ecosystem of Communigate developers.

I have to say that I’m impressed. Here’s a company not just talking vision, but delivering it. Communigate Pro 5.1 looks strong, and is a welcome addition to the VoIP marketplace.

Two days ago I spent the day travelling to Toronto and back on the Via Rail.  It turned into a rather long day, because just outside Brockville a train ahead of us on the track had a partial derailment.  The tracks were damaged, the train was damaged, and sometime just after midnight (after leaving us on the trains for over three hours), Via threw in the towel, called some buses, and sent us all home.

I had some time to write, and jotted down some ideas about Voice 2.0 which have been rattling around in my head for the last three weeks.  These have grown out of a series of conversations and email threads with Howard Thaw, Andy Abramson, Jeff Pulver, Martin Geddes, Richard Shockey, Bob Frankston, Henry Sinnreich, Steve Smith, Richard Stastny, Aswath Rao, Chris Wood, and many others.  The genesis of these ideas were first written down in December 2003 in a business plan which VC’s told Howard and myself was "unfinanceable".  Perhaps the ideas were too early then.  Perhaps their time has come now.

Voice 2.0 is what happens when the web intersects telephony.  It’s an empowered, user-centric vision of the world.  Unlike todays walled garden telecom networks, it’s a world where users and applications are pre-eminent.  It’s an "all about me" world — my directory, my applications, my identity. 

I’ve posted the Voice 2.0 Manifesto on Iotum’s Simply Relevant blog.  I did this quite deliberately, because this is the world that Iotum wants to play in.  It’s the world where Iotum’s applications are most meaningful.  It’s the world where we can be most successful.

This small essay is intended to provoke discussion, so please go ahead — read, enjoy, critique.