Disruptive Telephony

What factors should you consider when considering moving your communications applications to the "cloud"? What are the advantages of hosting in the cloud? The disadvantages? How can the cloud help you scale your applications? How can the cloud connect you to other communication channels beyond voice?

Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 22, 2011, at 1:00pm US Eastern, I'll be speaking in an online webinar on this topic called:

"Taking Customer Service to the Cloud"

The session will begin with industry analyst Daniel Hong from Ovum discussing what he found in his new 2011 research report, "Decision Matrix: Selecting a Provider of Cloud-based Speech Self-Service Solutions in North America." I will then follow discussing what you need to consider when choosing a hosted provider (such as that of my employer, Voxeo). Next Debbie Diersch from Chrysalis will discuss factors to consider when choosing an application developer... and then we'll throw it open to questions.

Daniel's got some great data and Debbie and I are both aiming to provide some solid educational material (i.e. it's not just sales pitches), so if the topic is of interest, the hour will be a good use of your time.

You can register to join for free. The session will be recorded for later viewing, but if you register you will also get a copy of the soon-to-be-released Ovum report (a $2,500 value).

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What is the best way to deploy communications applications? In the hosted "cloud"? On your premises behind your firewall? Or some kind of hybrid approach? Back in February I presented in a Voxeo "Best Practices" webinar on just this topic: Best Practices in Deploying Communication Applications: Cloud vs On-Premises vs Hybrid. While a recording and the slides of the hour-long session have been available on the webinar page, it is also now available via Voxeo's YouTube account:

The great part about YouTube is that you can view it on many different devices, including mobile devices like the iPhone or iPad.

It was an enjoyable session to present with lots of great questions. If you have any feedback on the session or would like to know more, please contact me.

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With all the buzz around the "cloud" and "cloud communications", what is the reality amidst the hype? That's a topic I'll be discussing in a Voxeo webinar on Tuesday, February 15th, called "Best Practices in Deploying Communication Applications:  Cloud vs On-Premises vs Hybrid". Given that Voxeo's had literally hundreds of thousands of apps deployed in both our hosted cloud and also on customer premises, we've learned a thing a two that I'll be sharing. I'll talk about questions such as:

• What are the advantages of deploying voice and SMS applications into the cloud? 
• What are the disadvantages? 
• What are the security issues you need to be aware of? 
• When is it more appropriate to deploy applications on your premises? 
• What kind of hybrid architectures are now available and what are their pros and cons?

Tuesday, Feb 15, 2011
8:00 AM US Pacific, 11:00 AM US Eastern, 5:00 PM Central European

REGISTER TODAY

It should be a fun session... and we'll have time at the end for Q&A.

If you can't watch it live, the webinar will be archived for later viewing (and if you register, we'll alert you when the archive is available).

Image credit: me :-)

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If any of you will be in South Beach, Miami, next week I'll be there speaking as part of the Cloud Communications Summit and SIP Trunking Workshops. I've got a page up on Voxeo's site that shows my schedule at:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/itexpo-east-2011/

I know a good number of other folks from the VoIP/UC/Cloud Telecom/Voice Mashups/SIP/etc. world are all going to be down there, so I'm looking forward to catching up with some folks there.

If you are down in Miami for ITEXPO, the Cloud Communications Summit, Digium/Asterisk World or any of the other events, please do stop by and say hello... or find me down at one of the sessions I'm in (my schedule is online). You can always email me or ping me on Twitter.

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Today we announced over on the Voxeo blogs and in a news release that Voxeo has acquired Teleku, a startup letting developers quickly create voice, SMS and IM applications using a RESTful API from common web programming languages. Om Malik had a piece up at GigaOm: Voxeo Gobbles Up Teleku. We have a page up linking to articles like that one, a FAQ and providing other info:

blogs.voxeo.com/news/teleku/

I had a chance to sit down with Teleku founder Chris Matthieu and record this video about the news:

I'm admittedly biased, but I'm looking forward to what both Teleku and Chris will bring to Voxeo. It's a fun time right now!

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What if you could have a single application that communicated with your customers not just through voice but also through SMS, IM/chat and even Twitter?

That's exactly what we announced at Voxeo today with our new Tropo.com release. Tropo is our "cloud communications platform" operated out of our Voxeo Labs team that is focused on reaching out to web developers using today's programming languages and APIs. We launched it back at eComm in March 2009 and have been steadily adding more capability to it over the last year. Today the "beta" label was officially peeled off of Tropo, new international phone numbers were added, international speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) were added in 7 languages, and a host of other features were added, too.

Naturally, though, my interest was drawn to the fact that one of the channels you can now communicate to customers with is....

Twitter!

I demonstrated this in a post on the Tropo blog, "How to Add Twitter Support to a Tropo.com App - Step by Step", where I hooked up the Twitter account @danweathertest to an existing Tropo sample app I had that retrieved weather info from Yahoo!Weather when given a US ZIP code. I tweaked the app a bit and wrote about the tweaking in "An Example of How to Make a Tropo App Respond Differently to Different Channels (including Twitter)".

The cool part is that when it was all done, that single application is reachable via any of these communication channels:

Voice:

+1 (407) 374-3994
Skype: +99000936 9991438833
SIP: sip:[email protected]
INum: +883510001814088

SMS: (407) 374-3994
Jabber IM: [email protected]
Twitter: danweathertest

You can try it out by calling any of those numbers or using SMS, IM or Twitter. To use Twitter, just send a @ message to the Twitter ID "danweathertest" like this:

@danweathertest 32801

In a few moments you'll get back a summary of current weather conditions in whatever ZIP code you send it. Now the app isn't perfect... it doesn't do much in the way of error-checking and as I mention in the second blog post, I need to work on it a bit more to get rid of the initial prompt if you send it a ZIP code. I don't honestly know what it will do if you send it a bogus ZIP code. It's just a simple demo app designed to get people thinking about what you can do with apps that plug in to Twitter.

Want to try out building some apps yourself? Just head over to www.tropo.com and sign up for a free developer account. You can look at the many sample apps or, if you know python, you're welcome to play with the code to my sample weather app. (And if you don't know python you're of course welcome to play with the code, too... ) Have fun with it... I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with. (And I'll be writing more about Twitter apps soon...)

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As I mentioned on a Voxeo blog yesterday, the good folks at TMC recently posted a video interview I did with them at ITEXPO back in January in Florida. In the interview, I discussed:

• the Cloud Communications Summit and pushing communications out into "the cloud"
• security issues related to cloud communications
• what's next in communications, including multi-channel communications (a component of what we refer to at Voxeo as Unified Self-Service)

Anyway, for folks who wonder what it is I do, part of it is telling stories in forms like this...

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On Monday I'm heading down to Voxeo's corporate headquarters in Orlando, FL, but the week after that I'll be heading down to ITEXPO in Miami Beach, FL, where several of us from Voxeo will be speaking

Ironically, I won't be speaking actually at the formal "ITEXPO", but rather at the Ingate SIP Trunking Seminars and then at a new "Cloud Communications Summit" coordinated by Thomas Howe. Somehow my sessions wound up back-to-back... I'm just hoping the rooms aren't too far apart!

Voxeo will also have a couple of exciting announcements, so it should be a great event. Here's my speaking schedule:

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

11:30-12:00, Ingate SIP Trunking Seminars, Dan York

“The Enterprise Edge and Security”

Representing the VoIP Security Alliance (VOIPSA), Dan York will give an overview of security concerns related to Unified Communications and VoIP with a focus on SIP trunking.

12:00-1:30pm, The Cloud Communications Summit, Dan York

“Cloud Telephony for the Enterprise”

This session discusses tradeoffs in deploying communications applications behind the firewall, with a hosted partner or through elastic mechanisms such as Amazon’s EC2.

Other speakers planned for this session are Troy Davis, CEO of CloudVox, and Evan Cooke, Co-Founder and CTO of Twilio. Thomas Howe will moderate the session.

If you are going to be at ITEXPO, drop me a line. I'll have some of my podcasting gear and other equipment, so I intend to be producing some content from the show floor. I'll of course be tweeting, both as @danyork and @voxeo

See (some of) you there..

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If any of you are heading out to ITEXPO tomorrow through Thursday in Los Angeles, I'll be there on Wednesday. As I note on a Voxeo events page, I'll be speaking twice, pretty much back to back:

9:30 – 10:15am, Exploring Applications in the Cloud

11:00 – 11:45am, SIP Trunking and Security

The first is a panel discussion that should be quite interesting. The second is another version of the VOIP / SIP Security talk that I've been giving at Ingate's SIP Trunking Seminars for the past few years (and that always seems to be popular). More details and session abstracts on the events page I set up.

I'm looking forward to catching up with many friends at the show, including Andy Abramson, who I haven't seen for a while.

If you will be out there, please do say hello.

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This week, I (Dan York) am at the Enterprise 2.0 conference today through Thursday at the Westin Boston Waterfront in downtown Boston. The keynote panel I'm on, The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise, doesn't happen until Wednesday morning at 9:15am... but I came down early as a good number of the sessions are of interest.

If you are at the show and would like to say hello, please do email me. I expect to also be posting updates to Twitter on both danyork and voxeo.

You can also follow along with the conference "backchannel" on Twitter by following the hashtag "#e2conf". Here's an easy search URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=e2conf

I expect to have a very cool Voxeo announcement out on Wednesday, too... but more on that then... ;-)

P.S. And why do I do the silly "I (Dan York)" construction at the beginning of this post? Because I see my content being scraped and so "I" alone doesn't make sense in other places the content winds up :-)

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