I was in a meeting with one of our most exciting clients yesterday, and we were planning the deployment of the Enterprise Voice Mashup we are creating for them. As we discussed the options for testing, cut-over and redundancy, it occurred to me how many advantages Voice Mashups have over traditional voice applications in terms of deployment strategies. Due to their blending of VoIP and Web Architectures, and their jettisoning of call state, Voice Mashups are brilliant in the real world.

Here’s an example of a clear Voice Mashup advantage taken from the project we’re working on: simple, incremental deployment. Imagine that you are a Web portal company, such as Google, with a new home page to test out. Given the state of web balancers, DNS record schemes and the like, you would never deploy the page to your entire audience. In whatever ratio that makes sense, ten percent of visitors, one percent, one hundred a minute or once a day, the new web page could be delivered to the user, and result tested. In the event some sort of failure, the web user would simply try again, and because getting the page in the first place was rare, wouldn’t see it again. The clever Internet engineer will tie the ratio of the web page delivery with the chances of failure. I have heard it said, and I firmly believe it to be true, that because cell phones and VoIP relaxed five nines reliability they created space for true voice innovation.

Since Voice Mashups are built on this very same technology, we can apply these very same principles. Our particular project is replacing a help desk task with a voice script. When someone calls with this problem today, a human being answers the phone. As we deploy the application, our first step is to peel off a single call, and see how it goes. If it fails, they’ll call back. After single calls seem to be solid, we could take one every ten minutes, and see how it stands up, eventually letting the entire audience use the script. This moves forward to revisions in the future. Version 2.0 of our application can have the very same deployment strategy, and we could go backwards as fast we deployed 1.0.

The advantages don’t stop there, and the ability of Voice Mashups to manage service delivery risk is a true innovation for voice. Good to be here to see it.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 3:30 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | 1 Comment

With abject apologies to the Bard for the title of this post, we have been having terrific discussions regarding British Telecom’s 21cn API as it relates to the business class mashup revolution. These discussions always include thoughts on the evolution of Telcos, agile Enterprise focused business processes, as well as the pace of innovation coming from the Web focused developers.

Our company sits at the intersection of the Enterprise, Telco, and Web worlds. Every day, we get to talk and work with people and companies who are interested in mashups, service delivery platforms, and communication enhanced business processes.

British Telecom is certainly viewed as the first model for future Telcos as a service delivery platform. Orange and Vodaphone are right there too.

There are big money, venture backed companies like Blue Note Networks, Lignup, and others that have been focusing solely on the platform model of CEBP delivery. Literally hundreds of companies are focused on hosted mashup technologies and a smaller subset are focused on communication mashups.

What is fascinating about our conversations with these companies,whether very large or very small, is they are being driven by the language, methods, and culture of the web world.

For the most part the obstacles to their growth  have very little to do with solving difficult technology challenges. Overcoming internal cultural issues especially in the Telcos is a real challenge. What happens if our garden is no longer walled? Will people actually add value?

For the Enterprise, the challenge is really about business process creativity and agility. What happens if our people, vendors, and customers have access to our business processes? Can they make us faster, better, smarter?

For the innovative hosted and platform solution providers, the challenge is really about finding or creating channels to customers. Can I find and execute on a sustainable business model before the money runs out?

It is fascinating that all these conversations and efforts are showing us the future direction of business to business communications, collaboration, and commerce will be filled with mashup solutions.

My Punjabi friend has a toast, “May you live in interesting times.” We certainly do.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 1:53 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Within the last 6 months, the word mashup seems to have been adopted by just about every technology company as a way to reference the availability of their own API, show off how they have integrated with someone else’s API, or as an attempt to rebrand an existing software development platform in a manner that might attract a larger development community.

This evolution of marketing language is a natural business process and very interesting to watch as non partisan observers, given our role as a professional services company rather than a product company.

However, as the voice mashup aka CEBP (communications enabled business process) space matures the real value add of using mashup technologies will become apparent in two ways.

First, companies that develop and deploy voice mashup technologies will carve out expertise in specific verticals. Telcos add value because they touch everyone. Voice mashup/CEBP type companies add value because they touch one type of industry or customer better than anyone else. Specialize.

Secondly, we will all get much more serious about understanding business process management systems. We will either be deeply integrated within our clients’ existing business process management systems or we will bring best of class BP tools along with us. Process is important.

The faster this happens the better for our companies and our clients.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 2:35 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Seems to be a storm brewing around the future of Facebook’s voice apps, started today by Stuart, and picked up by Alec, Jon and Andy.

I’m not going to dispute the numbers, but apparently, about six months after the Facebook API was made public, we’ve been been through a complete market cycle. VoIP apps are failing on facebook, so it’s time to pack it in and call it a day. You would have to be a complete fool to waste your time there, no? Of course you would. There can’t be anymore than, say, 100k installs of Facebook voice apps to date, where I was expecting to have a gazillion or so. Six months is enough for a gazillion, right? Because that’s the way it is in any market… it fully develops in six months.

Anyways, gotta get back to my coding. Just thought I’d share.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 5:08 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Even though I tell my friends that the reason I love Thanksgiving is my geographical and genetic proximity to Plymouth, the fact of the matter is that I am completely Turkey addicted, unapologetically so. Thanksgiving is the one day devoted to gluttony, and I do my part to keep that grand tradition alive.

I’m going to tap one of my favorite telco 2.0 companies to help me celebrate this day. MySay has a service which is simple, yet brilliant. With MySay, you call in with your phone and leave a message for others to hear. I’ve got a voice message for you here. If you would, why don’t you leave me a message, too - I’d love to hear from you! Even better, why don’t you wait until you are half in the bag from Merlot and drumsticks.

To all my tryptophantic brethren, my best wishes to you and your family - we all have much to be thankful for.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 11:31 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | 1 Comment

In the spirit of Freakonomics, I’ve been able to find a key differentiator between voice mashups and voice applications : call state.

Let me take a minute to catch our non-technical audience up on call state (this is for you, Mom.) When writing a voice application, you often have to worry about what the phone is doing : is it ringing, is it off the hook, is in on the hook, etc. If you are trying to patch two phones together, you have to worry about the call state of each of the two phones. And in general, when one phone does something, it means you have to make the other phone do something. For instance, if the first phone hangs up, you typically hang the second phone up too.

All this has major implications to the engineer:

• Call state is unique to every phone, and therefore if your application crashes, you loose the call state of the phone, and the call goes down. Bad for both reliability and scalability.
• Call state happens in real time, so you absolutely need to have fast performance to handle call state applications.
• Call state requires a working knowledge of phones and phone protocols, a rare and difficult to reproduce skill.

If your application is deeply concerned with call state, it is probably a voice application. If the application really don’t care what the call state is, it is probably a voice mashup. The degree of call state involvement is the degree to which voice is the star in your application. Voice applications, such as unified messaging, call centers, PBX productivity enhancements and prepaid services are loaded with call state. Voice mashups, like applications that use voice for data collection, notification and process visibility often have no involvement in call state.

In turn, the fact that voice mashups have limited exposure to call state has the following implications:

• Since call state is not involved, voice mashups are more reliable and scalable.
• Since call state is not handled in real time, voice mashups can be written with less stringent real time requirements. (This means you can use the most modern CASE and 4GL tools like Ruby and Cordys)
• Since no working knowledge of phones and protocols is required, more and less skilled people can write them.

To be clear, there’s a vibrant market for voice applications. Near as I can count, there are about ten to twenty important applications, and they aren’t going away anytime soon. Lots of money there, too. But, as we’ve talked about countless times before, there are tens of thousands of applications that can extended using voice mashup techniques, and fortunately for everyone, are call state light.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 8:59 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | 1 Comment

And in the other corner, weighing eight hundred pounds, the Avaya avenger, the King of the Ring, the Communications Enabled Business Process.

You might be aware of Avaya’s Communication Enabled Business Process. If you are not, it’s Avaya’s response to the need for every enterprise to integrate real time communications into the business process. Rich Tehrani also had a good post about this, and Forrester has a new report dedicated to the topic. The Lippis Report has an excellent post on it:

CEBP, by definition is a custom project. There are business process modeling consulting organizations, which are today’s efficiency engineers, working through business process to save an organization time and money. But CEBP promises to be much more; it promises to deliver a new kind of agile and competitive organization that can respond to business events quickly, satisfy customers more deeply, and in the process create competitive barriers of entry. There are tremendous opportunities for companies who analyze innovative communications technology like CEBP as it presents a new paradigm for business communications. CEBP promises to contribute to better corporate decision making by inserting human decision making at the right time with the right people and providing the right context to decision makers through multi-channel communications.

You might be wondering what the differences are between CEBP and Voice Mashups, and as near as I can tell, they are :

• Voice Mashups and CEBP solutions seek to solve the exact same problem. When you integrate real time communications into the business process, you make the business run faster, with less resources and with happier customers. Both Voice Mashups and CEBP answer this need.
• Voice Mashups tends to be a lighter weight approach, and CEBP tends to be heavier weight.
• A voice mashup will tend to extend a current implementation using web services and pay-as-you go software. CEBP solutions tend to involve big iron, big investment and big vendors.
• Voice mashups can be projects that cost less than a week’s worth of an engineer’s time to develop and deploy. CEBP solutions can have six figure solutions.
• Voice Mashups tend to integrate with exteneral web services in addition to telephony services such as data validation or Google Maps.
• CEBP solutions come from proprietary vendors. Voice Mashups tend to be open source and open standard driven.
• CEBP solutions tend to still be centered on voice “old think” (Bigger and better voice applications. Unified Communications solutions come to mind.) Voice Mashups tend to be centered on using voice “new think” (using voice to extend existing applications).
• CEBP solutions come from guys who wear ties to the beach. The voice mashup guys are very sexy. (Obviously.)

I’m quite happy to see such a push from large vendors on the problem my company is trying to solve. It’s validation that the problem exists (it does), and that businesses will invest money in this area (they will). The question is, when do you choose CEBP solutions, and when do you choose VoIP mashup solutions?

• Choose voice mashups when you wish to minimize risk, costs and maximize leverage from your existing infrastructure.
• Choose CEBP solutions when you are investing into the next generation of communications equipment for your Fortune 500 or large government, and your relationship to your existing big vendor is essential for your success.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 9:38 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | 3 Comments

To be clear about this, although I am an engineer by training, upbringing and general demeanor, my business is far from a hobby or a science experiment. That’s why I’m concentrating on voice mashups. I’ve got four kids to put through college.

I caught a recent blog post from Ike Elliot about Voice Mashups, where he opined that they were un-inspiring. Don’t get me wrong, as Ike is clearly a smart, accomplished and well respected man, and I find myself wishing to read more of what he writes, but I think there’s a huge point he’s missing here.

In the mashup example that Ike mentions, my customer cut his costs by 75%, my company has a clear 50% margin, and the ROI was nearly instantaneous. My customer has ten such projects under their roof, every medium to large company in the world has a similar ten problems, all requiring solutions enabled by Voice Mashups. There’s no real magic in deploying them, and all that’s required is intent and imagination.

Perhaps the article that Ike read was uninspiring… because, for a man with a payroll to meet, VoIP mashups do it for me, and my customer.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 10:10 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | 2 Comments

BOSTON, Oct. 24 /PRNewswire/ — FALL VON — Pulvermedia’s Vice
President of Business Development Bill Kelly today announced a joint
venture with Thomas Howe, of Thomas Howe Company, to lead the Innovator’s
track at Fall VON and to help further integrate the Mashup community into
the VON community.

The Fall VON Innovator’s track will include a traditional, VON-style
executive summit featuring a number of companies that challenge the status
quo. Howe will also lead the “un-conference,” featuring an innovative
approach, where the agenda is set once the meeting begins. This dynamic
format enables participants to identify what they want to talk about, and
organize themselves into groups and sessions to exchange and gather the
information they seek. This productive, exciting and unfiltered format has
been proven to bring out the most from the audience at VON.

During the un-conference, Howe and his colleagues will create a voice
mashup, in real time, in front of the audience. A mashup is a web
application that combines data from more than one source into a single
integrated tool (such as cartographic data from Google Maps with real
estate data from any number of sources), thereby creating a new and
distinct web service that did not originally exist by either source. Howe’s
expertise rests in bringing voice to the mashup equation. At VON, Howe will
help attendees see first-hand how mashups are created, and he will also
help participants gain a better understand of the power of this new
approach to voice enabled applications.

The application created will benefit Innovations for Poverty Action
(http://www.poverty-action.org) a charity dedicated to researching,
developing, and testing solutions to real world problems faced by poor
developing countries. Howe’s voice mashup will provide a light-weight
mobile credit scoring application to international microfinance
institutions. This voice mashup will provide the latest illustration of the
power of IP communications. Additional details on this mashup will be made
available at Fall VON.

Pulvermedia also announced today that Howe has become a regular monthly
contributor to VON Magazine. “We’re excited to bring Thomas to Fall VON in
such a significant way, and we’re looking forward to sharing his expertise
with the entire VON community,” said Pulvermedia’s Vice President of
Business Development Bill Kelly.

“VON has long been the centerpiece of the IP communications industry,
and now, more-than-ever, it has become the place for next generation
communications,” said Thomas Howe. “I’m thrilled to give back to the
organization that has given me — and my customers — so many opportunities
over the years.”

About the Thomas Howe Company:
The mission of the Thomas Howe Company is to become the world’s leader
in developing real time communications mashups for the enterprise.
Combining real time communications elements such as VoIP, SMS and presence
with the business process, makes businesses run faster and more
efficiently, and make their customers happier and more satisfied. Our team
combines best of breed components, Web based services and open source
technology to create compelling and valuable applications for companies of
all sizes.

About Pulvermedia:
Pulvermedia is the leading integrated media company, building
communities and providing ready marketplace access through its unparalleled
blend of trade shows, publications, web channels, and progressive
cutting-edge media. And as the foremost integrated media company,
Pulvermedia is ideally poised to deliver a vast range of messages to a wide
variety of audiences, including technology buyers and sellers, government
regulators, industry analysts, luminaries, pundits and bloggers. For more
information, please visit http://www.pulvermedia.com.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 11:04 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

We are thrilled about our new relationship with Pulvermedia. In addition to the regular contributions to VON Magazine we will be providing executive level training on Enterprise solutions to select VON delegates prior to the March show. Special thanks to Pulvermedia’s Vice President of Business Development Bill Kelly for his creative thoughts about growing the VON community.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 10:35 am | Filed Under News | 1 Comment

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