Silicon Valley-based cloud web telephony darling Twilio has launched its Voice product in the UK as well as opening a new office in East London, allowing developers to finally purchase UK phone numbers and target local users. It’s also serious about expanding in Europe — together with the UK launch, Twilio is offering beta services to developers in Poland, France, Portugal, Austria, and Denmark.

Developers have longed for Twilio to go international, and now three years later it’s finally happened. The company hopes to reach 11 more countries by the end of this year (um, two more months?!).

That’s one way to spend the $12 million raised about an year ago. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to have the attention of Valley super angels Dave McClure and Ron Conway. Not only do they back Twilio but also came up with the Twilio Fund ”for startups that use Twilio’s messaging platform.”

Back in September Twilio signed up Zendesk (another well-funded Silicon Valley startup) as a major customer, and incidentally both companies seem to have aligned their European ambitions — Zendesk recently opened its London office, and will offer Zendesk Voice to its European customers as well.

On the other hand Tropo, a major competitor that’s backed by Orlando-based Voxeo, was first to offer international availability, but now it looks like there’s going to be an intense race to lure developers from across the pond and beyond.

My first VoiceCon in 2010 was so much fun (oh yeah, I also learned a lot and made quite a few new acquaintances) that I knew I had to plan for Enterprise Connect 2011. It was also my first live on-site coverage for insideCTI (I’d just started the blog a month earlier), so I really didn’t know what to expect. In 2010 my family tagged along for the 8-hour road trip to Orlando to provide moral support (in the form of “We get to visit Mickey!”) and endured a few days of hotel stay with me, away from the comfort of our TV, sofas, and beds. I would go to the conference during the day, return to the hotel for a “home” cooked supper, then start organizing my notes in order to start burning the midnight oil on the blog. Thankfully the hotel WiFi offered decent speeds.

This year I flied solo, road trip and all. Driving myself for eight hours down Interstate 75 was rough — the various segments of road work made it worse — and again I was reminded that I’m not in college anymore. Still, I think eight hours was about the threshold before I’d gladly subject myself to TSA groping. Had the conference been held in Miami then the TSA would’ve had me by my… Well, you get the idea.

The Gaylord Palms Resort (commonly known as the “biodome” to returning conference goers) hadn’t changed much: the same lush plants, the humidity, the bored alligators, and lots of Avaya banners. Yep, no doubt I had arrived at the right conference when I walked in early Monday morning to pick up my media badge.

Before the trip I’d thought that Skype would be the most talked about exhibitor (and David Gurle, VP Skype Enterprise, also a featured keynote speaker). After all, everybody Skypes these days. And that’s both at home and in the office, both audio and video. Skype’s intention of moving into the enterprise market is also well known now. Some may even say that Skype’s one of the first unified communication applications.

But frankly Skype Enterprise didn’t have anything spectacular for this conference. A partnership with Citrix GoToMeeting, a pitch of 24/7 support tied to SLAs, and a closer relationship with Avaya (a sibling company also sharing Silver Lake Partners as an investor). Disappointedly, nothing too exciting, especially when details were hard to come by too. Was it being overly conservative and cautious because of the planned IPO this year?

The debut of the Innovation Showcase was awesome. Not only did I get to learn about new companies (ProtonMedia, Radish Systems, harmon.ie), but Fonolo was one of the winners and I got to catch up with CEO Shai Berger. I hope the showcase becomes a regular part of Enterprise Connect (and winning companies granted better booth locales).

Speaking of innovation, I was introduced to Hookflash CEO Trent Johnsen whose company came in second in the recent StartupCamp 3 in Miami. Always a pleasure to meet a tech entrepreneur outside of Silicon Valley (he’s from Calgary, Canada).

The always professionally dressed and equally professionally equipped Dan York, Director of Communications at Voxeo, was kind enough to meet with me to chat about his company and the conference in general. Too bad he didn’t divulge any juicy news about possible acquisitions, but he did touch upon some things such as Voxeo’s new office, growth in its Beijing office, and a new data center in Asia. He also wondered why Google or Apple — two companies representing Android and iOS, respectively — weren’t represented at any of the sessions discussing UC mobility. I shared that same sentiment. I eagerly await the year when either of those companies shows up at Enterprise Connect…

Data networking giant Cisco proved it’s not just a one trick pony with SocialMiner winning Best of Enterprise Connect 2011. This social customer care solution monitors social media networks and lets a company effectively respond to customers. (Side note: Avaya also has a similar product called the Social Media Manager, and compared to SocialMiner the UX was night and day.)

The highlight of the trip was probably the invitation-only media dinner hosted by Verizon on Monday, at a steakhouse inside the biodome. The dinner was great (had the buffalo steak and bread pudding for dessert), but even better was the opportunity to chat with folks from Verizon and Cisco, not just about UCCaaS but really having regular conversations at the dinner table. Alas, it’s good to know that marketing people are humans too and not androids programmed to divulge only corporate press releases.

Was there a low point? Unfortunately, yes. If anyone found a VirginMobile MiFi hotspot, please return it to me. It’s a blogger’s best friend and I’d lost it sometime on Tuesday, March 1.

But overall, I had a blast this year. Although I didn’t do much liveblogging (I do love liveblogging though) this time, my tweet stream was fairly consistent during the events I attended. And kudos to the good WiFi coverage at the venue this year, most of the time my iPhone 4 was able to last till the end of the day even with heavy tweeting. In fact, lots of people participated in #enterprisecon (I hope Dan’s thumbs are okay) and it made the conference even better!

Enterprise Connect 2012 is March 26-29 at the same biodome. What will next year’s hot topics be? (Please, not interoperability…)

WebForPhone, a service of NetXentry, is now part of the Voxeo family. The acquisition was announced November 17.

Never heard of the company? Neither have I. Another hosted IVR company. Another speech-enabled company. Seems to fit well with Voxeo’s tech philosophy.

But there’s one thing that stands out for me:

Second, companies that offer self-service by Internet can now augment it with similar telephone/speech self-service. WebForPhone has a methodology to interact automatically with clients’ websites, just as if the website interacts with an Internet station. This is offered on utility like terms. No IT involvement. No installation charge. Pay by minute or by fixed price per call or transaction. Use as much as desired; we offer large traffic capacity…

It’s an interesting proposition. Not many IVR companies care about your website, even though the website probably gets as many users if not more than the IVR. How much money is usually spent on a corporate self-service website project? Why not leverage that in the voice self-service scenario?

This is the tenth acquisition in four years for Orlando-based Voxeo. Any more before the end of 2010? Or another acquisition right before EnterpriseConnect 2011 (formerly VoiceCon), which is held annually in Voxeo’s backyard?

Press release:

Orlando, FL – November 17, 2010 — Voxeo Corporation, the leader in Unlocked Communications™, today announced it has acquired NetXentry, LLC, and its WebForPhone application hosting service. WebForPhone staff have joined Voxeo and WebForPhone customers are now covered by Voxeo’s industry-leading technology and customer support. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

NetXentry launched its WebForPhone service in 2001. With a focus on providing advanced speech application hosting, WebForPhone delivers comprehensive self-service solutions for customers in the financial, retail, and healthcare industries.

Voxeo is now providing 24-hour-a-day support to all WebForPhone customers and applications with no immediate changes. Over time Voxeo will work with customers to migrate their applications to Voxeo’s VoiceObjects On-Demand platform where they can receive the benefits of multi-channel Unified Self-Service™, deep real-time analytics and interactions with business intelligence systems. WebForPhone customers will be able to expand their interaction beyond voice to also include text messaging (SMS), instant messaging, mobile web and social networks such as Twitter. They will be able to access over 60 real-time reports and connect the report data into leading business intelligence systems including IBM Cognos, Oracle, SAP BusinessObjects and MicroStrategy. Their applications will reside on Voxeo’s global infrastructure that is optimized for real-time communications and provides the industry’s only 100% Uptime Service Level Agreement.

“Through WebForPhone we have gained a great set of technical people with deep knowledge in delivering speech solutions,” said John Amein, Senior Vice President, Mergers & Acquisitions, of Voxeo. “We look forward to their contributions as we continue to develop the world’s leading platform for communications applications. WebForPhone marks Voxeo’s 10th acquisition over the past four years and we are pleased to welcome both WebForPhone staff and customers to the Voxeo family.”

WebForPhone will also help support all of Voxeo’s existing customers in the greater Philadelphia market. More information about the WebForPhone acquisition can be found at: http://www.voxeo.com/webforphonefaq.

About Voxeo

Voxeo unlocks communications. We loathe the locks that make voice, SMS, instant messaging, Twitter, web chat, and mobile web unified communication and self-service applications difficult to create, manage, analyze, optimize and afford. Every day we work to unlock the neglected value of these communications solutions with open standards, disruptive innovation and a passion for problem solving–fueled by a company-wide obsession with customer success. We do so for more than 200,000 developers, 45,000 companies and half of the Fortune 100 from our headquarters in Orlando, Beijing, Cologne, and London. Visit us or join our conversations on the web at www.voxeo.com, blogs.voxeo.com, or twitter.com/voxeo.

Voxeo Media Contact

Dan York
Voxeo Corporation
Phone: +1 (407) 455-5859
dyork@voxeo.com

Did you take a moment to ponder upon 10/10/10? The Answer to Life was revealed that day. Sorry if you’d missed it! (101010 is the binary of 42)

The rest of ITEXPO West StartupCamp coverage — Vokle and GroupMe — can be found this week (here and here). GroupMe was especially fascinating not only because of its simplicity, but also of its TechCrunch back story.

And of course, Microsoft was in the spotlight after unveiling its Windows Phone 7 in NYC after much anticipation from consumers and media alike. Some say Microsoft’s missed the window to become the iPhone killer or even the Android killer. Perhaps a valid point, but WP7 could easily turn into a Blackberry killer especially with Microsoft’s deep enterprise ties. The Smartphone Wars are more intriguing than ever, and will get even better when HP comes out with a new webOS smartphone next year…

Here’s an interesting sales strategy: snom technology is offering a free IP-PBX if you buy the phones. Granted, it’s only a 10-seater, but free is still an unbeatable price point, especially for the small business.

Voxeo steps into the limelight again with more Web telephony development goodness: Phono. Unveiled at the jQuery Conference on Saturday, this simply SDK aims to really transform the browser into a multichannel communications medium. All using the simple magic of jQuery JavaScript.

Stay cool, readers – friend us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and feed us on RSS.

If anything, the success of Google proves that anyone with unwavering determination and technical know-how can transform Web services. Who doesn’t want to be like the Big G, eh?

Now’s your chance. Earlier today, at the jQuery Conference in Boston Voxeo Labs made it a little easier for any developer to become a mini Google, especially in the area of Web telephony (ala Google Voice) and communications (ala Google Talk).

Say hello to Phono and the PhonoSDK is live for download:

PhonoSDK is a simple jQuery Javascript plug-in that turns any Web browser into a multi-channel communications platform capable of placing and receiving VoIP telephone calls from the browser as well as handling real-time chat communications and more.

PhonoSDK allows jQuery developers to easily add and style a softphone in any Web browser application and in minutes call any SIP address and receive calls to the SIP address dynamically create onReady.  Many web services already speak SIP such as Tropo, Teleku, and Voxeo, platforms.  Tropo allows Web developers to build sophisticated telephony applications like banking IVR systems with a simple RESTful Web API that can be controlled by the user’s voice or touch tones from their browser using the PhonoSDK!

This will be disruptive on another level unseen in communications. Just imagine: the ability to easily pair the ubiquitous Web browser with a vast cloud communications infrastructure from Voxeo to enable multichannel communications…for FREE.

If you own a company it’s time to update the website’s “click to call” feature to really mean “click to call” and not “click to get a call back.” Why still go through the telephone or cell phone when the customer can easily speak through the browser?

If you implement contact center projects it’s time to rethink that softphone on the agent’s desktop, especially if the center is already VOIP-enabled and the agents work on Web-based CRM screens. Better yet, you can skin it anyway you want.

If you develop Web apps — well, it’s never been a better time to take your Web app up a notch with multichannel communications features. Voice, IM, SMS, tweets, etc. — don’t be intimidated, try it!

We sure live in exciting, cloudy, mashable times — thanks to a company like Voxeo.

Need to catch up on this week’s posts on insideCTI? Allow me to do you a favor here and save you some clicking…

InsideCTI wrapped up the SpeechTEK 2010 coverage earlier this week with a climatic “Tidbits” post. Check out the photos all taken with the iPhone 4, which sadly doesn’t really work around Times Square. The highlight of the trip? Paying homage to Apple at its Fifth Ave. Store. Wait, I take that back — the highlight was definitely meeting all the good folks in person since we’d last seen each other at previous other conferences.

The 2600hz Project also came into the spotlight. Hooray for another open source telephony software project! Seriously, this world can never get enough of open source stuff. Thumbs up, guys!

I weighed in somewhat pessimistically on the Polycom-Microsoft partnership announcement. Let’s just say that I deemed the “F” in UCIF as something other than “Forum.” Is the world ready for Microsoft Communications Server “14″?

By far the biggest news to break this week was Voxeo acquiring Teleku. The news broke on the night of Wednesday, August 11 — I just happened to check Twitter that night, otherwise I would’ve missed it. Even its official press released specified August 12 as the announcement date. Voxeo continues its shopping spree — what’s next in the competitive Web/cloud telephony space?

As always, readers like you are what keeps the site ticking! Feel free to leave comments on the blog, join our Facebook page, and follow our Twitter feed.

With the latest Voxeo acquisition of Teleku, one thing is certain: Web and cloud telephony is front and center in today’s communications landscape.

Consider this: Phoenix-based Teleku started in January 2010, went private beta in February, became publicly accessible in March, picked up by TechCrunch in April, and acquired by Voxeo in August. So not even six months as a publicized startup, Teleku has been absorbed into one of the premier Web/cloud telephony companies.

Mark Headd on his Vox Populi blog shares his insight about the trend:

Portability – underscored not only by Teleku’s support for the open standard VoiceXML, but also the Tropo crew’s involvement in the Asterisk world, and the defacto standard for building Asterisk apps in Ruby - Adhearsion.

SIP integration – remember this kids: true cloud telephony has SIP baked in – the rest is just marketing fluff. Both Tropo and Teleku support SIP interoperability and make it very easy for developers to use SIP as part of their applications.

Multi-channel / multi-modality – Both Tropo and Teleku have big multi-modal chops. Being able to interact with users on multiple communication channels from one code base is a key tenant of unified communications and cloud telephony, and this will become increasingly important in the future.

Speech recognition – cloud telephony isn’t your grandfather’s way to build a phone app, so why should users be restricted to their grandfather’s way of interacting with a phone app? Speech recognition is fully supported in both Tropo and Teleku, and this will matter more and more to cloud telephony developers going forward.

This trend is undeniable. As I’ve blogged before, the new generation of telephony apps will be created by developers comfortable with mashups, Web standards, and scripting languages. So what movements can we expect going forward and from this acquisition?

Obviously, all eyes are on Twilio, the biggest competitor to Voxeo-backed Tropo. There’s a tweet that stood out to me, by @christoffe, which alleged that Twilio wanted to buy Teleku but “didn’t move fast enough.” Teleku founder Chris Matthieu confirmed that he did meet with the three cofounders of Twilio in San Francisco. But alas, Twilio and Teleku were not meant to be together.

Twilio has some good and well-known DNA in its leadership. It lists Dave McClure of Founder’s Fund and Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures as board directors, two VC names that need no further introduction. Other notable investors listed on CrunchBase include Mitch Kapor (of Lotus fame) and Chris Sacca (one of the first investors in Twitter). Total funding dated 12/2009: $3.7 million. No chump change, but now it has to face Voxeo’s $9 million (at least).

Will Twilio look for an exit? Obviously it understands the need to create a stronger organization with its interest in Teleku. Now it definitely needs a partner that is deep in telecom yet focused on the Web transformation. One company that comes to mind is Alcatel-Lucent, a company that’s made some interesting moves recently too, such as acquiring ProgrammableWeb.

Of course, there’s no telling which company Voxeo may gobble up next to change the game again.

Fresh off SpeechTEK and giving insideCTI a hint of acquisition plans, tonight Voxeo announced buying out Teleku (covered on this blog before), a Web telephony API provider. Voxeo, of course, is behind Tropo, one of the first Web and cloud-based telephony development platforms.

The acquisition makes a lot of sense since Teleku is already using Voxeo technology. But I think Voxeo was looking beyond the semi-competitive technology and wanted founder Chris Matthieu to be part of the Voxeo/Tropo team. After all, Matthieu was the sole founder of Teleku and worked tirelessly to grow the product and a loyal following quickly in its young lifespan.

According to Om, Chris Matthieu will join Orland-based Voxeo as Director of Business Development. Here’s an interview of Matthieu for the latest Voxeo Emerging TechTalk episode.

Matthieu summed it up nicely in a tweet: “…Teleku was a Voxeo customer and Tropo competitor – Now it’s a serious Twilio liability.” Watch out, Twilio, and congratulations to both Voxeo and Teleku.

Future (it’s dated 8/12) press release from Voxeo:

Orlando, FL – August 12, 2010 — Today Voxeo Corporation, the leader in Unlocked Communications™, announced it has acquired Teleku, a startup enabling web developers to build powerful voice and SMS applications. Teleku founder Chris Matthieu will join the Voxeo Labs team to focus on business development and enterprise adoption of Voxeo’s Tropo cloud communications service.

Teleku provides a platform for web developers to create voice and text-based communications applications using common web programming languages. Hundreds of developers have used Teleku to build applications including outbound notification systems, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), real estate talking houses, language translators, driving directions, games, and more.

Using any Web programming language, developers send XML or JSON instructions to Teleku over HTTP. These instructions tell the Teleku platform how to interact with users, and can use industry-standard VoiceXML, Twilio-proprietary TwiML, or Teleku’s PhoneML formats. The Teleku platform then interacts with users via voice calls, text-messaging (SMS), or Instant Messaging (IM). Teleku Voice applications can make use of both automatic speech recognition (ASR) in multiple languages or touch-tone/DTMF input. Teleku Text-messaging works with any SMS capable phone. Teleku Instant Messaging works with AOL, Cisco Jabber/XMPP, Microsoft MSN, and Yahoo IM clients.

Voxeo Labs is the innovation, incubation, and open-source focused R&D division of Voxeo. Voxeo is a profitable, employee-owned company that began building the largest world-wide communications application cloud in 1999. Voxeo’s cloud platform includes seven hosting facilities in the US, EU, and Asia and is used by half of the Fortune 100 and over 150,000 developers. Voxeo Labs’ Tropo service leverages the Voxeo Cloud to deliver reliable, mission-critical infrastructure for its customers.

Teleku was already a Voxeo customer using Voxeo’s proven real-time cloud infrastructure to deliver services and connect to voice, SIP, Skype, SMS, and IM infrastructure. Teleku will be combined with Voxeo’s Tropo (http://tropo.com) service. Existing Tropo and Teleku applications will continue to run without modification on the combined solution.

“Teleku shows how Voxeo’s cloud platform enables extremely rapid design, deployment, and scalability of new services that can respond quickly to changing developer and enterprise requirements,” said Teleku founder Chris Matthieu, “I’m excited to join Voxeo and help accelerate the adoption of the Tropo cloud communications service. Tropo enables both innovative web developers and enterprise call centers to deliver automated communications applications quickly and easily, and is an amazingly simple platform anyone can use to build multi-channel communications apps that leverage voice, SMS, IM, web and social channels like Twitter.”

“Voxeo has been making a concerted effort to provide multichannel development tools and solutions to their partners and enterprise customers. This is especially important as consumers from all walks of life adapt new devices and endpoints through which to communicate. It’s no secret that SMS is now one of the most frequently-used channels among younger consumers. Moreover, we’re seeing significant uptake of IM and Twitter as channels through which consumers interact with enterprises. Voxeo’s stack just got more powerful.”, says Ryan Joe, Associate Analyst on Ovum’s Customer Interaction team.

The Tropo.com cloud communications service is the flagship product of Voxeo Labs. Launched in 2009, thousands of developers have used Tropo to build applications that use voice, SMS, instant messaging and social channels to solve real business problems and create superior customer experiences. Tropo supports automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) in 8 languages, inbound phone numbers in over 30 countries, international outbound dialing, support for communication via Twitter and voice integration with traditional phones, SIP VoIP, and Skype.

“Voxeo’s mission has always been to make communication application development and deployment unlocked and uncomplicated for everyone,” said Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo. “Our focus on open standards and open source removes vendor lock-in. Our focus on the consumerization of IT and free services for developers and trials removes complexity. Chris and Teleku clearly share our vision. We are delighted to welcome Teleku to the Voxeo family.”

More information about Teleku, Tropo and how to get started with free developer accounts can be found at: http://www.tropo.com/telekufaq

About Voxeo

Voxeo unlocks communications. We loathe the locks that make voice, SMS, instant messaging, Twitter, web chat, and mobile web unified communication and self-service applications difficult to create, manage, analyze, optimize and afford. Every day we work to unlock the neglected value of these communications solutions with open standards, disruptive innovation and a passion for problem solving–fueled by a company-wide obsession with customer success. We do so for more than 100,000 developers, 45,000 companies and half of the Fortune 100 from our headquarters in Orlando, Beijing, Cologne, and London. Visit us or join our conversations on the web atwww.voxeo.com, blogs.voxeo.com, or twitter.com/voxeo.

Voxeo Media Contact

Megan Maxwell
Voxeo Corporation
Phone: +1 (407) 455-5848
megan@voxeo.com

Dan York has an interesting title at Voxeo. He’s the Director of Conversations, and possibly the only person with that job title in the industry. If you’re a social media addict like me who follows telecom and contact center tech, then you probably know about Dan, his blogs, and his tweets.

The Orlando-based company has appeared on insideCTI.com’s radar since the blog’s inception. In January the company acquired ClackPoint — its eighth acquisition in the last two years. Notice biometrics as a topic of interest in this year’s SpeechTEK? Voxeo was ready since February when it announced major partnerships with leading biometrics providers. Famous hacker Kevin Mitnick was the keynote speaker at its Customer Summit. And more recently, the company threw its support behind Adhearsion, a framework in Ruby to write voice apps for Asterisk.

We met on Tuesday and Dan shared the big news which was announced on the first day of SpeechTEK: VoiceObjects On-Demand. No longer will developers need a premise application server or IVR server in order to deploy VoiceObjects projects. Not only can he direct conversations, but I think he writes code just as well. During our meeting he felt completely as ease on his MacBook Pro with multiple VoiceObjects (in the Eclipse IDE) windows opened, as he explained and demoed the product. He also proudly walked me to the live demo system of a 10,000 port IVR on its Prophecy 10 platform chugging along with nearly 16,000 calls.

This was the piece of the puzzle still missing from Voxeo’s overall cloud strategy. And as a company known for Tropo and its commitment to simplify voice app development, Voxeo needed to take VoiceObjects to the cloud. Developers can develop for free and pay-per-minutes after live deployment. Developers can easily write apps with multichannel features like IVR, SMS, IM, etc. There’s built-in reports but the data can also be exported. There are seven data centers that keep humming to make it all happen.

So is Voxeo’s cloud puzzle now truly complete? I asked about possible M&A activity for the rest of 2010. I received no concrete answers, but that was expected. However, let’s just say that there were smiles all around during this part of the conversation with Dan and CEO Jonathan Taylor, who’d graciously joined us toward the end of the meeting. (This is a company not shy about M&A — its website lists a Senior VP of Mergers & Acquisitions on the “Management Team” page.)

answer();

say(“Hmmm, intriguing indeed.”);

hangup();

Official press release from Voxeo:

New York, NY – August 2, 2010 — Voxeo Corporation, the leader in Unlocked Communications™, today announced the release of VoiceObjects On-Demand, the new Software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of its popular VoiceObjects Application LifeCycle Suite.

VoiceObjects is used by enterprises and service providers including Adobe, IKEA, and T-Mobile to efficiently develop, deploy, and manage self-service solutions for their customers.  These solutions include Interactive Voice Response (IVR) services, mobile-web account management applications, automated text-chat agents, phone or web banking portals and more.  VoiceObjects On-Demand enables the rapid deployment and expansion of both new and existing VoiceObjects applications on Voxeo’s carrier-class SaaS hosting infrastructure.

VoiceObjects On-Demand eliminates the need for on-premise application servers, VoiceXML IVR platforms, phone lines, load balancers, and associated overhead.  Customers can significantly decrease costs and increase reliability by leveraging the new on-demand offering.

“For more than eight years VoiceObjects has delivered a greater than 2:1 improvement in self-service application development and maintenance costs,” said Jonathan Taylor, Voxeo’s CEO.  ”Voxeo’s new VoiceObjects On-Demand service delivers an equivalent reduction in self-service application deployment and management costs.  With VoiceObjects On-Demand, Voxeo is giving its customers a significant reduction in deployment costs, unmatched solution reliability, and the ability to expand rapidly as requirements change.”

Voxeo VoiceObjects provides enterprises and carriers with an open, flexible infrastructure for developing, deploying, managing, and analyzing customer self-service solutions.  Self-service solutions powered by VoiceObjects intelligently use stored information about each customer including self-service interaction history, call center / CRM system history, and data from other back-end systems to provide high-quality customer experiences.  VoiceObjects enables businesses to “mutiply the ROI” of their self-service application investments by automatically and seamlessly supporting customer interactions via voice (IVR), SMS, IM, web-chat, Twitter, interactive video, and both mobile-web and mobile-native applications.

VoiceObjects On-Demand brings ten additional self-service platform advantages to any enterprise or service provider:

1. Instant startup.
2. Instant expansion.
3. Zero hardware costs and affordable pay-as-you-go pricing.
4. Full control over application integration and lifecycle management with no vendor lock-in.
5. Mission-critical infrastructure including multi-site redundancy, business continuity, and proven scalability.
6. Direct access to Voxeo’s world-wide hosted VoiceXML IVR platform, deployed in seven sites around the world.
7. Direct access to Voxeo’s high-quality, inexpensive speech recognition capabilities in 40 languages.
8. Direct access to other Voxeo features including encrypted call recording and SIP VoIP connectivity.
9. Connectivity to existing on-premise VoiceXML IVR platforms from Avaya, Cisco, Genesys, Intervoice, and more.
10. Voxeo’s unmatched 100% uptime SLA including 24×7 support and guaranteed 20 minute responses.

“Voxeo clearly understands the power of deploying multi-channel communications apps in the cloud,” said Dan Miller, Senior Analyst at Opus Research. “By making it simple to deploy VoiceObjects’ suite of applications, Voxeo is giving enterprises a powerful way to connect with their customers at relatively low cost, with little administrative overhead and demonstrably high availability.”

Along with the release of VoiceObjects On-Demand, Voxeo also announced the availability of its Analytics On-Demand service.  Voxeo Analytics On-Demand provides deep, real-time insight into what customers like and dislike about self-service applications.  This insight allows businesses to tune and optimize their self-service solutions to enhance the customer experience, increase customer loyalty, and improve automation rates.  Voxeo Analytics On-Demand includes detailed reports on average call duration, business task completion rates, speech recognition quality, most frequent users , input analysis, customer usage paths, and customer exit points. Reports can be viewed live in Voxeo’s web-based customer portal and can also be batch-exported into existing Business Intelligence platforms from IBM Cognos, MicroStrategy and SAP Business Objects.

To learn more about VoiceObjects On-Demand, get started with a free account today and download a free Early Access edition of the VoiceObjects 10 Desktop for Eclipse, please visit http://www.voxeo.com/vo-ondemand.

About Voxeo

Voxeo unlocks communications. We loathe the locks that make voice, SMS, instant messaging, Twitter, web chat, and mobile web unified communication and self-service applications difficult to create, manage, analyze, optimize and afford. Every day we work to unlock the neglected value of these communications solutions with open standards, disruptive innovation and a passion for problem solving–fueled by a company-wide obsession with customer success. We do so for more than 100,000 developers, 45,000 companies and half of the Fortune 100 from our headquarters in Orlando, Beijing, Cologne, and London. Visit us or join our conversations on the web atwww.voxeo.com, blogs.voxeo.com, or twitter.com/voxeo.

I know what you’re saying: Adhear-what?

AdhearsionCon. Now open for registration.

Developing telephony apps these days has never been easier. Programmers have a variety of languages to choose from, several frameworks and APIs to refer to, and none of them cost much (or at all). Better yet, the inevitable convergence of telephony and Web has brought us innovative mashups and, in my view more importantly, a new generation of telephony and voice app developers. These developers are well-versed in Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc., savvy with third-party APIs, and immensely comfortable with Web technologies.

You may have heard of Twilio, Tropo, Teleku, QuickFuse, and the like. You definitely know about Skype, Asterisk, and Google Voice. And perhaps a bit curious about SIP. Not many folks have heard of Adhearsion (myself included), but it’s definitely something worth digging into.

For starters, Adhearsion is a framework written in Ruby to help developers code voice apps for the open source PBX, Asterisk. Why Ruby? Why Asterisk? (Check the FAQ, jack.)

It’s also open sourced and backed by one of the biggest names in cloud-based voice app development, Voxeo.

I would encourage any developer — Web or voice or anything else — to check it out, especially if you’re in the Bay Area. After all, I believe the world is a better place with you knowing how to bend open source telephony to your will.