Legion are the stories of small and medium businesses who are using Skype for their worldwide communications operations.

• Skype is the cornerstone for keeping Toronto-based  b5media’s worldwide staff of bloggers, editors, developers and executives in touch via both informal and formal conversations.
• SeeWorthy gets an assist from Skype when communicating with their Taiwanese supplier (via an Alberta-based translator), North American and Caribbean agents, and prospective European distributors as well as their customers.
• A Canadian-headquartered resource company is using Skype voice and IM for communications with their operations in Asia; their biggest challenge involves time-zone issues. Skype chat’s inherent asynchronous nature helps to address that issue.

Skype itself claims that about 30% of all its user activity is business related. I often encounter small businesses who have a wealth of stories about how Skype contributes to their business success.

But during a recent conversation with OnState CEO Pat Kelly I learned about how Skype is stealthing its way into medium to large enterprises. Pat discussed two examples (who will remain generic until case studies are available):

• OnState received an enquiry from a major North American parts distributor whose operations involve agents, resellers and business customers spread out across North America. While this company has an internal IT team, the CFO was focused on significant cost reductions for their call center operations. He has now contracted OnState to provide voice, chat and other customer relationship communications activities that do not simply save money but provide additional communications processes such as IM with its inherent presence and chat features. Once the contract was signed, the CFO mentioned he would guide his IT personnel with their role in the implementation.
• A European country manager for a worldwide, US-headquartered business found that he was getting charge-backs for “corporate” communications services that did not meet his particular needs. He had enough autonomy that he investigated OnState’s services, went through not only the technical specifications but also the legal reviews and business process requirements. He is now meeting the communications needs of his business ecosystem using Skype and OnState’s other auxiliary services for call center and virtual PBX requirements. Subsequently other European subsidiaries of the same company are implementing OnState’s services. Yet this is a situation where the U.S. head office has yet to be contacted about what additional opportunities for Skype and OnState may exist within their business.

Pat’s key point is that, in today’s economically stressed environments, there’s a trend where CFO’s and business unit managers are making the key communications services decisions in larger enterprises in order to meet their financial goals. IT personnel are playing little or no role in the decision making although they may be involved to a limited degree in the implementation. What are Pat’s key observations?

• The consumer experience with Skype is stealthing its way into business implementations, not only with prosumers and small businesses but also at the business unit level within larger enterprises.
• Why? Skype just plain works. There are no firewall issues; OnState’s SaaS model eliminates capital investment for PBX’s and related infrastructure.
• It’s relatively easy to implement.
• Economic pressures are driving adoption.
• Where a business partner or customer has Skype also, HD Voice, incorporating SILK, provide for more productive voice conversations.
• It’s not simply about using a technical mashup across multiple services (Skype, Google, and Voxbone, for example) involved in OnState implementations; it’s a “business mashup” involving business processes and employee acceptance.

It’s a repeat of a trend that drove personal computers into larger enterprises twenty-five years ago. I recall one story where a Canadian bank Vice President found an employee with a PC that had a modem attached (with, at best, a 1200 kbps speed). The modem was ordered disconnected! Bank security was going to be upheld despite technology progress. Four years later that same bank ordered over 10,000 PC cards from my employer of the day for inclusion in their new, at the time, teller terminal system.

Bottom Line: Even if it’s not totally free it’s the raw cost savings that are driving Skype adoption, sometimes in co-operation with their business software partners. It’s about not only lower calling costs but also the elimination of capital asset costs. For some business markets Skype is stealthing its way into business communications infrastructure.

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• OnState Upgrades On Demand Call Center and Virtual PBX (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Skype Modifies Fair Usage Policy (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Business Long Distance: Death by 1,000,000 PBX’s (voiceontheweb.biz)

Over the past three days there has been a continuous stream of presentations that provide insight into a wide range of issues, opportunities and perspectives in the IP-based communications space going forward. While there will be more posts covering individual presentations, it’s worth taking time to mention a few highlights:

• Most innovative, outside-the-box, presentation: Ge Wang of SMULE (Sonic Mule) and his presentation including recordings of the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO). Become your own iPhone musician by breathing gently into the iPhone’s mic using their Ocarina iPhone application (warning: small fee $0.99).
• Most outstanding announcements: three offerings that open up new user experience opportunities in a Voice 2.0 world (Yes, I already blogged about these but they still stand out as winners for both the service providers and end users.)
  • Voxeo: Tropo.com opens up the Voxeo platform,  previously limited to the small population of voice developers, to hundreds of thousands of web developers.
  • Skype: making the superwideband SILK codec available royalty-free to any relevant hardware or software vendor that wants to bring new user experiences to voice calling.
  • Jaduka: the appointment of Thomas Howe as CEO will accelerate the adoption of voice into existing business processes, eliminating the error-prone mundane while opening up new standards for applications such as healthcare procedures, customer satisfaction and service deployment.
• Other presentations of note:
  • Martin Geddes, Head of Strategy, BT: there is value in addressing issues of efficiency and effectiveness inherent to business processes. Martin proposes that the key business model is to satisfy the needs of parties who want to interact with customers; for instance, improve the productivity of call center employees
  • Shai Berger, Fonolo, whose deep dialing service has now mapped out the IVR trees of over 500 companies and presents new opportunities for customer service operations.
  • Mobivox, expanding their voice-activated mobile services platform with their CRM for Voice business tools.
  • iNum, announcing support for IM and presence, initially with Google Talk
  • Alan Duric continues to see ongoing profitability and success at Norwegian service provider Telio. Why? a continuous stream of innovation and new value-added services.
• Some themes and issues across multiple presentations:
  • Spectrum 2.0: several presentations and a panel covering issues related to (the lack of) spectrum management and “white space”. In major markets over 90% of available spectrum remains unutilized.
  • Regulatory issues: the challenge of creating and executing a user-oriented regulatory framework under “the first technology administration”. Network neutrality: is it more a “buzz phrase” than a real issue? Seeding the policy makers with players who understand regulatory issues from both an innovation and business opportunity orientation as opposed to supporting monopolies or duopolies. Aligning regulation with the application potential of emerging communications technology.
  • API’s: several presentations from vendors who provide free API’s that support third party developers in writing applications that are then hosted by the vendor: IfByPhone, Voxeo, Jaduka, Ribbit, Adhearsion (whose Jay Phillips, right, provided a tutorial incorporating programming to Skype for Asterisk),

One note: there were a lot of innovators and forward thinking people amongst both the speakers and the audience. Most interesting was that there were at least six attendees from carriers who were asking the questions about how carriers can adapt to this emerging communications world: SaskTel (2), T-Mobile US, Rogers, NTT. eComm’s biggest challenge for next year will be to attract a larger audience of carrier personnel. In personal conversations I learned a lot about their issues that may work its way into future commentary.

Overall, eComm 2009 once again provided a primer in a wide range of aspects of the emerging communications space. With Thomas Howe leading Jaduka’s CEBP charge into larger enterprises, Voxeo addressing a huge community of web developers, Skype offering new levels of call quality to the entire communications hardware and software community, Fonolo solving that PITA known as punching your way through company IVR systems and Calliflower offering new user experiences in conference calls, the next few months will prove most interesting. Most challenging to observe will be how these technologies and services assist business and personal issues in times of a most challenging overall economy.

Timothy Hay, Wall Street Journal wrote up Jon Arnold’s panel on “New Ways to Monetize Voice” : VoIP Start-Ups Scramble To Find Niche (subscription may be required)

Alec Saunders: eComm – strong stuff

As indicated in previous posts, Voxeo has become a leader in the development and hosting of voice applications. From their website:

Voxeo helps enterprises improve service and lower costs by automating and connecting their most common phone calls with our Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or Voice over IP (VoIP) solutions.

Our IVR and VoIP hosting, turnkey platforms, and developer services – powered by VoiceXML and CCXML – are used by over 35,600 companies to create and deploy any telephone application they desire.

Historically Voxeo has provided, at no charge, resources for C++/Java and Web Developers to produce customized IVR applications that are then hosted at their network operations center. Their developer community has grown to over 35,000 participants. As their expertise has grown they have also developed their licensable Prophecy SIP platform for those enterprises that wish to host their own services using Voxeo’s tools.

Until now their voice applications required the use of the VoiceXML standard which placed limitations on their appeal to the broader developer community. Today, an announcement at eComm 2009 removes this limitation; Voxeo will be providing the tools to support the creation of voice applications in five languages: Python Ruby, PHP, Groovy and ecmaScript:

Tropo is an application platform that enables web developers to write communication applications in the languages they already use: Groovy, Ruby, PHP, Python and JavaScript. Tropo is in the cloud, so we manage the headaches of dealing with infrastructure and keeping applications up and running at enterprise-grade. Tropo is simple to deploy, requires no contracts and no up-front setup costs. With Tropo developers can build and deploy voice and telephony applications, or add voice to existing applications.

Via Voxeo’s new Tropo platform built on their existing infrastructure, developers can then deploy their applications on Voxeo’s hosted offerings via their Tropo.com portal. Applications can incorporate inbound calling via PSTN, SIP, Skype and iNum while also providing appropriate connections for outbound calling.

Voxeo’s business models simply runs at a cost of 3 cents per minute for use of the service. There are no setup charges or contracts required; payment is via credit card. CEO Jonathan Taylor claims it takes five minutes to set up and deploy via Tropo.com.

Additionally Voxeo announced that the  developers of Adhearsion, a Ruby-based rapid application development framework, will be making their framework support the Tropo platform.

For developers who want to have a deeper look, check out the Tropo launch site where there are incentives for developer participation. One more relevant Voxeo blog post: Get the Tropo sample applications – via git and Github.

Voxeo’s announcement is a major contributor to the evolution of the Voice 2.0 world, opening up opportunities for a much broader community of developers and integrators.

Over the past ten years Orlando, FL-based Voxeo Corporation has grown to become one of the largest hosts of enterprise Interactive Voice Response (“IVR”) applications, building not only tools for developing and hosting these applications but also a track record of twenty profitable quarters as a self-financed private company.

Historically Voxeo has provided, at no charge, resources for C++/Java and Web Developers to produce customized IVR applications that are then hosted at their network operations center. Their developer community has grown to over 31,000 participants. As their expertise has grown they have also developed their licensable Prophecy SIP platform for those enterprises that wish to host their own services using Voxeo’s tools.

Today Voxeo announced an expansion their development expertise, technology base and user community through the acquisition of Germany-based Voice Objects.

While acquiring ownership of Voice Objects’ technology assets, Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor emphasized in an interview with me yesterday that Voxeo’s first reason for making an acquisition is to acquire the expertise and professionalism of the employees. Contrary to the popular perception of making an acquisition and focusing on the technology assets, Voxeo looks for team players who can fit into Voxeo’s culture and then look at the technology synergies.

As a bonus the Voice Objects acquisition brings to the table as customers a new layer of developers; namely those who routinely develop “self-service” applications for service providers and enterprises as a full time occupation. Jonathan described Voxeo’s current developer resources as having two layers: API-based telephony libraries favored by C++/Java “low level” developers and  XML-based telephony languages using Voxeo’s proprietary but simplified VoiceXML as well as other XML standards for web developers. The acquisition of Voice Ojbects introduces a higher level of object-based telephony tools, employing drag-and-drop and visual rapid development techniques.

Whereas Voxeo’s legacy tools facilitated people-to-people connections, Voice Ojbects’ toolkits facilitate the development of “self-service” applications where no human is involved in delivering or provisioning enterprise or carrier-based services.  It is multimodal in that not only is voice involved but also SMS messaging and video can be brought into the application where appropriate. For example, T-Mobile Czech can easily program changes into their self-service applications reducing development times by an order of magnitude while dynamically addressing market needs.

Taylor described Voice Objects’ toolkits as having three major components: a rich development environment, unified self-service middleware – that connects customer information within an enterprise with customers who desire access to this information via voice, SMS or other modes – and, finally, extensive analytics. The analytics component gathers real customer usage data and provides justification for making application modifications based on user experiences as well as changing local market conditions. To quote Jonathan: “Business owners don’t want to build a bad experience; however, it is challenging and difficult to build applications that work well for customers.”

In closing our interview, Taylor mentioned that Voxeo, recognizing that the best way to recruit talent is through acquisitions of this nature, will be looking at three or four similar acquisitions in 2009 building up a team of “great people who understand the industry well”.

The acquisition of Voice Objects will not change Voxeo’s business model of making their developer resources available at no charge while charging either for hosting of applications or for platform licenses sold to enterprises that wish to host their own applications.

It appears that Voxeo continues to set a benchmark for operating a sustainably profitable business in the Voice 2.0 world. On a broader scale Jonathan has provided an overview of the various levels of developer segmentation and classes of tools available on the market today for creating Voice 2.0 applications.

Other posts on this acquistion:

• Vox Populi “Best Freaking Voice Platform on the Market”.
• Dan York at Voxeo: What the Voice Objects Acquistion by Voxeo means for voice applications developers.
• Michael Dinan, TMCNet: Voxeo Acquires VoiceObjects, Expands Cost-Saving IVR Solutions
• Andy Abramson, VoIP Watch: What’s New In VoIP? Lots with Gizmo, Voxeo and Fonality

Tags: Voxeo, Voice Objects. Jonathan Taylor, acquisitions

When calling into an enterprise of any reasonable size, we all love to navigate our way through those pesky (and repetitive) enterprise auto-attendant services or phone trees that go through menu after menu to connect you directly to an appropriate destination service or person. NOT!

At last spring’s eComm 2008 we first learned about Fonolo, a “Deep Dialing” service that bypasses phone trees to connect you directly with the destination extension you really want to reach. I provided a detailed description of Fonolo, incorporating a video, on Web Worker Daily three weeks ago. While Fonolo has been in private beta for a few months, today it is launching a fully open public beta.

I asked Fonolo CEO Shai Berger, aside from the open public beta announcement, what have they learned from the private beta and what other experience have they gained during this period? His response:

• Fonolo has grown to provide Deep Dialing for over 300 companies from 150 six weeks ago.
• They are learning what is required to scale the service; it’s not the web portal  that presents an issue but rather the scalability of the service itself where they need to be supporting several hundred concurrent calls over the phone network in real time. “Every call involves a “deep dial” which is processor intensive and uses voice recognition to make sure they get to the right place within an enterprise’s menu.”
• From the beta test experience, “We’ve learned that ‘Deep Dialing’ has tapped into a vein of consumer frustration. We get lots of fan mail! We’ve also learned that the companies people want to call are concentrated on a few verticals, in particular wireless providers and ISPs. We’re going to disclose our “top 10″ enterprise category list at some point in the future.”
• What are the goals for the open public beta? “Watch how the service scales with usage and watch usage patterns. This is particularly important in helping to determine the structure of premium services.”

But there’s more to the Fonolo story than simply “Deep Dialing”. With the data collected during the beta periods and the services they are considering, they will also be able to provide a service to call centers to assist them with improving their productivity. This would include providing data on where users get lost in a menu, hang up in frustration or end up at an inappropriate destination. Martin Geddes foresees potential for Fonolo as having more benefit for call centers than for consumers; check out Fonolo’s role in a discussion led by Martin at the recent Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm conference in London, U.K.

… [but] who benefits more: the consumer, or the call centre? We think that it’s the latter, and the consumer is the price-sensitive side. The call centre wants the maximum rate of self-care, high customer satisfaction, and the web site offers the ability to do all kinds of enhanced multi-modal interactions that a 0-9*# keypad can’t do well… Therefore in our two-sided market world, we’d get telcos to distribute and promote this tool (on their fixed, mobile and on-device portals). They would then sell these enhanced capabilities to call centres.”

At the recent Mobilize 08 Shai announced the Fonolo application for iPhone, to become available early in 2009; Fonolo was awarded the Judges Prize at this event’s LaunchPad segment. And, given the target user base, I’m sure they’ll be looking into putting a BlackBerry application on their roadmap.

Symantec is one of the recent additions to their enterprise directory. I could have used Fonolo a month ago when I was having an issue with upgrading a Norton security product and had to make multiple calls to the same support line to resolve the issue.  A mouse click and getting a call-back would have been a lot simpler and less time consuming than pushing “9″ four times – interspersed with tedious voice directions – to get to the appropriate service personnel. .(The good news is that the issue did get resolved.)

Sign up for the Fonolo open beta here.

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Earlier this week the GMail weblog announced GMail voice and video chat; basically they are designed to add voice and video modes to an email thread; from the GMail blog post:

… today we’re launching voice and video chat — right inside Gmail. We’ve tried to make this an easy-to-use, seamless experience, with high-quality audio and video — all for free. All you have to do is download and install the voice and video plugin and we take care of the rest. And in the spirit of open communications, we designed this feature using Internet standards such as XMPP, RTP, and H.264, which means that third-party applications and networks can choose to interoperate with Gmail voice and video chat.

This afternoon I had an opportunity to try it out with Hudson Barton; publisher of the Borderless Communicator weblog and tracker of “Real Skype Users”. We had a 20 minute conversation using my Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks on a Wiindows laptop and the webcam on Hudson’s MacBook. There are two viewing sizes available: a 225 x 140 window inside the GMail tab of a Firefox (or other browser) session and an optional pop-up window that goes to 430 x 270. We were only able to determine that it provides a “letterbox” 1.6 width-to-height ratio (as opposed to the 1.33 ratio of “standard” video), but not the frame size or frame rate actually being transmitted over the Internet. As for CPU usage, the “googletalkplugi.exe” was using between 10% and 17% of my CPU. With no accessible statistics along the line of Skype’s option to display call statistics, it was not possible to drill down further. Both audio and video quality were clear and crisp – quite acceptable for a basic one-to-one conversation. Echo cancellation was apparent; Hudson was using the native speakers and mic of his MacBook with no perceivable echo..

It’s definitely not up to the feature set of Skype but here’s where it fits in:

• GMail certainly has a large user base, same order of magnitude as Skype.
• It’s easy to forward your standard POP/IMAP email account to GMail; I use this feature both for the resulting search capability and the available access to GMail on multiple devices, including smartphones.
• It provides real time conversation mode options for GMail threads being read on a PC. While reading an email and running the cursor over the sender’s name, an option pops up to respond to the email message by email, Chat or Voice/Video based on the sender information as shown in the graphic above.

I would classify GMail Voice and Video Chat as a very mild competitor to Skype, suitable for basic “free” voice and video as a conversation enhancer. There’s no way to establish or check audio and video settings; there’s no access to the PSTN. While the video is quite good, it certainly does not meet Skype’s High Quality Video standards. It’s a perfect example of embedding voice and video into an application as a feature but it’s not a standalone real time conversation software application. When I consider the rejuvenation of Global IP Solutions and look at its customer base, I can foresee many other forthcoming instances of embedded voice and video as a feature within an application.

Note: as for the installation issues that Aliza encountered, I simply went to the URL suggested in the GMail weblog post and installed the plug-in (with the browser open). But then you have to restart your browser (in my case Firefox); initially the “video availability indicators” (as represented in the graphic above) were not present but I had to head out at that point. When I came back to my PC four hours later, they had appeared. Chat pixel dust from the (Google) cloud in the interim is my only explanation. At the time of writing this post, its availability should have spread to many GMail accounts by the usual Google osmosis process.

Full disclosure; the author has had previous first hand experience with what was thought to be an application but turned out to be a feature. Quarterdeck’s mid-90′s effort at building a web browser as an application was thwarted when Microsoft decided to make its web browser (aka MS Internet Explorer) a feature within the Windows operating system.