Thomas Howe has long been noted for his expertise in developing “Communications Enhanced Business Processes” (“CEBP”). Fundamentally this involves embedding communications facilitation into a legacy business process such as to reduce operating overheads and/or increase employee productivity. From many of the examples I have seen, I would call it eliminating the “intrinsically mundane” from any requirements for human intervention or participation at a given stage in a business process.

Enriched with his unique sense of humor Thomas has spent the past three years evangelizing CEBP through consulting contracts, speaking at seminars and forums and his personal weblog. Today, Jaduka, a provider of business process optimization through “blending real-time communications into critical workflows”, announced that Thomas has been appointed as CEO of Jaduka. Through this appointment Thomas gets to execute on his passion by seeing his vision implemented across a wide range of enterprises of all sizes.

In a Calliflower conference call this morning Thomas provided more details about where he sees Jaduka heading:

“My focus will be on helping our enterprise software partners and customers employ communications to improve efficiency, employee productivity and customer experience. With an API accessed by companies a million times daily and a platform with 1 billion user accounts, Jaduka is well positioned to serve both the $250 billion BPO and $350 billion Telco 2.0 marketplaces.”

• Jaduka is focused on embedding voice into existing enterprise applications; they are NOT a provider of voice applications (see Voxeo for these)
• the Jaduka API is already called upon over one million times per day demonstrating that it is a solid, tested, robust service
• Jaduka has solved the problem of scalability; this is perhaps Jaduka’s leading differentiation from any competitors
• Jaduka is looking to launch a new service that will make it radically easy to integrate voice into current enterprise applications
• Jaduka focuses its marketing efforts on enterprise developers (and not telephony or voice developers); they look to partner opportunities with enterprise software vendors such as Oracle and SAP as well as system integrators.

Thomas was another of Andy Abramson’s “draft picks” for leading change in the conversation and communications space. From my own personal experience interacting with Thomas over the past eighteen months, Jaduka has a winner at the top who can now deliver cost savings and productivity enhancements to many, many enterprises in these economically challenging times.

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• Howe goes to Jaduka (saunderslog.com)

When fellow blogger Dan York joined Voxeo Corporation last October, very few of us in the IP-based communications blogging space had heard of this rapidly growing service provider. Over the next few months, sometimes with Dan’s assistance, Voxeo has become a familiar name identified with a self-financed startup, a profitable business and a very large enterprise customer base focused on supporting voice applications through third party development activity. Revenue generation comes solely from their “cloud” hosting and VoIP/SIP communications server software business. Last week, in following up on a couple of press releases, I had the opportunity to interview Voxeo’s CEO, Jonathan Taylor, and to learn much more about their success story.

Fundamentally Voxeo provides hosting environments for telephony applications, whether hosted on their in-house server “cloud” or on a customer’s premise-based servers. Developers write applications to their Prophecy platform creating XML files and SIP connections that are understood by the Prophecy-enabled servers. The Prophecy 9 client used by developers to create and manage these applications is now available for Mac OS X and Linux in addition to their legacy availability for Windows. Originally Voxeo only offered a hosted service but two years ago, in response to customer demand, they also provided the capability to support customers’ premise-based servers. Key elements of their program that have led to their success (and profitability) include:

• No charge for downloading, and use of, their software
• A focus on ease of development and deployment
• Charging customers only when a service is launched and providing business value
• Option to use either Voxeo’s hosting “cloud” or customers’ premise-based servers (usually based on the overall business case for supporting the application)
• Licensing based on a “per port” or “per minute” business model, as appropriate
• Providing Prophecy as a suite of components for SIP implementations
• A platform based entirely on open standards
• Including solutions for supporting conferencing, voice mail, call recording, speech recognition and auto-attendant requirements
• A strong channel and developer focus recognizing the role of third party professional developers as their key to implementing their enterprise customers’ services
• Lowering their customer support requirements through innovation in their software.

Two recent press releases covered:

• Launch of Prophecy 9, providing support for OS X and Linux clients to their platform as well as a new management console that not only reduces the complexity of development and associated deployment costs but also provides increased scalability.
• Acquisition of Beijing, China-based Micromethod, not only complementing Voxeo’s Prophecy suite of modules with their SIP-focused products but also providing a base for expanding Voxeo into serving the Asia-Pacific markets..

When I asked Jonathan about representative applications beyond the flexible yet effective IVR applications they can support, the list of several thousand applications includes:

• Intelligent call routing (using their call control features)
• Voice mashups providing access to, say, email or Google Calendar
• Anonymous calling services
• Facilitating calling services for children’s websites such as Nickelodeon.

Jonathan summed up their application support as providing a “services innovation platform” that operates “at the edge”, bypassing any carrier dependence beyond acting as a pipeline for their services. A final key feature is their provision of a highly accurate billing infrastructure, critical to their ability to support both their own invoicing and receivables management as well as their customers’.

Last Wednesday Voxeo issued a third press release discussing some of their business success with revenue growth of 99.7% (no rounding allowed – who would believe 100%, they say), 18 successive profitable quarters and a very high customer retention rate. Not being a public company they do not need to release any detailed financials. But building and supporting a community of 31,000 developers probably says it all.

In conclusion, Voxeo’s business represents a practical, successful and profitable implementation of Alec Saunders Voice 2.0 Manifesto, emphasizing that the value-add for voice conversations going forward lies in the applications.

Note 1: Tomorrow morning (August 26) Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor will be the guest for Alec Saunders’ daily Squawkbox conference call. Dan York provides more details on how to participate. If you miss the call, you can hear the recording posted on SaundersLog.com.

Note: Voxeo’s hosted “cloud” also supports connectivity to Skype for inbound calls.

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New service provides format- and platform-agnostic meeting scheduling and co-ordination across the web.

To date groupware’s ability to perform meeting scheduling and coordination was limited to within an enterprise’s groupware community of users — i.e. – the employees and perhaps closely connected business associates. And everyone had to be using a common calendaring system running under a common operating system. Yet, studies show that over 60% of meetings will involve invitees who are not within this “enterprise cloud”. Half of those “non-cloud” invitees do have a “good” relationship with the enterprise; the other half are those with whom employees would have “sporadic” meetings.

Tungle is an Internet-based service that provides the ability to share availability and manage meeting scheduling across the web. Currently the designated organizer of the meeting (who does not have to be an attendee) must be using Microsoft Outlook; however, the invitees can be running on any platform, whether Windows, Mac or even Blackberry; they simply need a web browser. And they can be using any calendaring application whether Outlook Calendar, Google Calendar, Mac’s iCal, or within groupware such as Lotus Notes.

Tungle Contact Management

The Tungle client for meeting organizers has a single-click install as an Outlook plug-in. Upon installation it then searches your Outlook for both Contacts and your availability according to your Outlook Calendar. If it finds other Contacts who also have installed Tungle it marks them with an identifier “T” logo. You may then invite individual contacts to “share” their availability; those are the ones identified with the “T” logo on a solid purple background. Select one of those contacts and you will see in the Calendar screen that contact’s availability.

The other section of the Tungle client comprises a Calendar which initially shows your own availability for the current (5-day or 7-day) week. This Calendar section is where you initiate the coordination of a meeting – selecting contacts, entering a subject and designating the time slots you (or the primary “chair” of the meeting) would have available for potential meeting times. You can also designate whether or not you will be attending the meeting – a feature that is ideal for executive administrators.

Tungle Calendar Mashup

The example on the left shows the sharing of availability across an organizer and three other contacts, shown by the different colors, who are also on Tungle. (Were the organizer not attending the purple slots would go away.) The organizer would then “paint” in blank potential time slots for the proposed meeting. Upon completion of this information, click on the “Create Space” button and another window pops up where you can see a summary of the invitees and proposed time slots and as well as enter more detailed information about the potential meeting such as an agenda. Click on the “Send” button and an email, from the meeting organizer, about the prospective meeting goes out to each invitee, incorporating a link.

Tungle Invite on BlackBerry

The link is to a “Tungle Space” which is a dynamic web page, viewable in any web browser, that shows all the meeting information and allows invitees to select which of the proposed time slots s/he prefers. If the invitee reads the email on a Blackberry, the Tungle Space is reformatted for appropriate display on the Blackberry. Note that, until a final meeting time is set, the Tungle Space is updated with any changes in availability of those who have a Tungle client installed.

There are two ways a final meeting time can be set:

• The organizer can visit the Tungle Space at any time and designate a meeting time regardless whether or not all invitees have responded, or
• Once the last invitee has visited the Tungle Space to select her/his available meeting times, Tungle will then automatically select a meeting time.

Once a meeting time is selected an email goes out to all invitees announcing the meeting time. Those invitees who are also on Tungle will have their Outlook Calendars appropriately populated. But here is one of the key features: the other invitees can click on a link that inserts the meeting time into their respective calendaring program regardless of whether whether they use Google Calendar, iCal, Lotus Notes or any other popular Calendaring program.

In an interview with Tungle CEO Marc Gingras he pointed out:

• ease-of- user was a key design criteria; this is an offering that has been over a year in the development.
• recognizing which Calendar format an invitee had was another major technical challenge
• Tungle will be adding clients for users of Google Calendar and iCal (you can sign up on the website for notification)
• the team is still working on additional features incorporating feedback from the current beta phase.

The entire structure is set up to ensure adequate privacy; only information you agree to share is shared. In fact, as with Skype, while users’ email addresses are registered by Tungle and used to determine who amongst your Contacts is on Tungle, this information is never give out at any point. There is even a double opt-in process for ensuring that you are, in fact, the owner of any email address that you register with Tungle.

Personally I have used Tungle over the past week with great success. It’s simple to install and eliminates lots of non-productive time exchanging emails with various meeting time slot proposals (or even making voice calls to finalize details). . In fact, Tungle appears to be one of those rare productivity applications whose value is quickly appreciated the first time you use it.

Going forward I have suggested API’s that could link Tungle as a front end for hosts organizing VAPPS HiDef Conferencing sessions (or even Skype Conference call sessions); I can also foresee where deeper direct integration into Blackberry Calendar or CRM applications, such as Salesforce.com, would be useful. And it’s ideal for Skylook users who already are archiving their Skype conversations into Outlook. Tungle does have plans for making this an integral web-based “social networking” tool that is “just there” when you have to organize a meeting.

So, if you are an Outlook user, download Tungle here and get organizing!

Tags: Tungle, Marc Gingras, Outlook, Google Calendars, Lotus Notes, iCal

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