Voxeo Labs and Adhearsion are spreading their wings

I had a terrific conversation with Jay Phillips and Jason Goecke about Adhearsion and their new gig with Voxeo Labs. Here is a press release describing the Voxeo/Adhearsion announcement this summer.

Having been introduced to the wonderful world of Open Source tools,projects, and communities during my time with a regional ISP and web development shop I have always been amazed by the creativity and brilliance found within many of these communities. As a Bus. Dev/Sales type I would scroll through SourceForge and look at projects to figure out how they might be valued by various types of customers. (Yes, that's about as geeky as a non- technical Bus. Dev. guy gets!)

So, I love the direction the VoxeoLabs team is driving. They want to create iterations on the Adhearsion/Tropo frameworks so that other communities of developers can take advantage of Voxeo services. Voxeo has done a fantastic job building a vxml developer community. Why not excite or encourage the Ruby community or other developer communities into leveraging the Voxeo network too?

It makes a lot of logical sense and Voxeo Labs will absolutely be able to leverage the existing Voxeo and Asterisk community to gain even more traction. They will absolutely see some real success!

However, there is a caveat. Others have tried and failed to build highly scaleable business models based upon open source efforts. This needs to be looked at clearly and honestly. It doesn't mean that LAMP,for example, isn't the most widely adopted web server platform. I think? There are real limitations to building a business off these types of projects or by simply opening up apis. Orange suggests their API developer community exceeds 50,000 members. Is the business model a success? Unfortunately, No.

In my mind, communications services continue to be valued by end users so FREE isn't an absolute requirement. But, profitability is severely constrained if you are limited to charging per port, per minute, per channel.

One of the points I have made frequently is that we will be seeing a land grab mentality very soon. The land grab is NOT simply for developers but ultimately for the enduser applications purchased by businesses or consumers. Eventually, communication services will be embedded and adding value to almost every application and business process extending itself beyond the company firewall or household PC.

The closer one gets to the end user is where the maximum value can be identified and monetized. When done well, CEBP solutions help us better communicate with and understand customers. Then, profitability is assured.

Patrick Murphy
CEBP.biz

The CEBP ecosystems begin to mature

Within the past week or so, three interesting announcements show that the CEBP ecosystem is beginning to mature in fascinating ways.

1. Nuance purchased Jott. I find this announcement to be curious. I am a big fan of both companies. Jott has done a great job with their consumer and small business focused diary application that leverages a non Nuance based engine. Nuance is the dominant player in speech recognition technology. I haven't seen any serious analysis of why this is an intelligent move for Nuance or Jott. Competition from Google and Microsoft is one off the cuff answer. The VCs created an exit for themselves is another answer. I am interested in learning more about this deal.

2. Voxeo hires the Adhearsion guys
Since you can't technically purchase an open source project, hiring the founders is the next best thing. Again, all the principals in this deal are people I really respect. This could be a very smart move IF they don't get pulled into the trap of so many open source projects...the perception that everything is Free! Yes, I have reviewed Chris Anderson's latest book FREE.
However, getting pulled deeper into the per minute commoditization game will eventually destroy the valuation that Voxeo has tried to build up.

3. Jaduka announces relationship with Strikeiron.
This is the first of several announcements Jaduka will be making with Strikeiron. As I have mentioned previously many times, creating a developer strategy is just one phase in the 4 pronged strategy for a CEBP go to market effort.

From our perspective Strikeiron provides a dream channel for Jaduka's services to developers.
* StrikeIron is not only the largest provider of web services, but they have the largest number of Enterprises that uses these services
* StrikeIron is pre-integrated into NetBeans, allowing our services to be available to the millions (4 million downloads last year!) of Enterprise developers already working on SOA and WOA applications
* StrikeIron is pre-integrated into IBM’s Mashup Center, allowing IBM, its partners and customers to voice enable any application without costly and expensive integration efforts
* StrikeIron is pre-integrated into SalesForce, the largest SaaS provider in the world

Our little edge of the Telecom industry is starting to heat up.