Voxeo

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Voxeo Corporation
Type Privately Held / Employee-Owned
Industry Telecom
Founded 1999
Headquarters Orlando, FL
Key people CEO: Jonathan Taylor
CTO: RJ Auburn
Revenue unknown
Employees 150
Website www.voxeo.com

Voxeo Corporation is a technology company that specializes in providing development platforms for unified customer experience (self-service) and unified communications (real time communications) applications. Voxeo's products are all available as SaaS / Platform as a service (public cloud), on-premise software (private cloud), or hybrid clouds that combine the public-cloud and on-premise components. Voxeo products include:

  • Prophecy Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform
  • VoiceObjects multi-channel (IVR, SMS, IM, web, social) service creation environment
  • PRISM SIP/HTTP/XMPP Java application server and media server (previously SIPmethod)
  • Tropo multi-lingual cloud-based communications platform for voice, SMS, IM and Twitter
  • IMified hosted instant messaging application development and deployment platform
  • SMSified hosted SMS (text messaging) application development and deployment platform
  • Phono web-based softphone and coloboration SDK

Customers have developed a wide range of applications on Voxeo's platform, ranging from traditional customer service IVR systems to conferencing systems to outbound notification systems. As of September 2011, the company reported that over 220,000 developers have joined Voxeo's developer programs.[1]

Voxeo is headquartered in Orlando, Florida with main offices in Cologne, Germany; Beijing, China; London, UK and San Francisco, USA.

History

Voxeo was founded by Jonathan Taylor and others in 1999[2] with the goal of making it easy for web developers to create telephony applications. In 2000 and 2001, the company received around $40 million in investments from Crosspoint Venture Partners, the Mayfield Fund and others.[3] In September 2004, an employee- and management-led buyout of the investment firms[4] moved the company into being an employee-owned private company, a status that continues today.

Voxeo has grown its services through both internal development and acquisition. In October 2005, Voxeo acquired the VoiceXML IVR platform and customers of Vocomo.[5] In May 2006, Voxeo launched a European subsidiary.[6] and followed that in July 2006 with the acquisition of VoiceReady, which provided Voxeo with their Designer graphical tool.[7] In August 2008, Voxeo acquired Micromethod Technologies of Beijing China, gaining a presence in Asia and also SIP Servlet technology.[8] In December 2008, Voxeo announced the acquisition of VoiceObjects of Cologne, Germany, adding a rich application development tool to Voxeo's portfolio.[9] Those acquisitions were followed by hosted IM application provider IMiifed in May 2009,[10] open source telephony framework Adhearsion in July 2009,[11] Motorola's VoiceXML browser business in October 2009,[12] and web collaboration platform Clackpoint in January 2010.[13] Voxeo acquired cloud communications platform Teleku in August 2010[14] and application provider WebForPhone in November 2010.[15]

Over the years Voxeo has received industry recognition, recently including placement in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for IVR in 2008,[16] listing as one of only two "shortlist" vendors by analyst firm Datamonitor in 2009,[17] and receiving the highest rating of "Strong Positive" in Gartner's 2011 Marketscope for IVR Systems and Enterprise Voice Portals.[18]

Competitors include Tellme Networks, West Corporation, Genesys, Avaya and others.

Services

Voxeo provides the Prophecy application platform for premise deployment or via its global hosted infrastructure. The company began initially providing hosted/SaaS services in 2000 and then offered a premise platform in 2006. In March 2009, Voxeo launched the Tropo.com[19][20] platform that allows developers to create voice/telephony applications using the languages of Ruby, Python, PHP, Groovy and Javascript or via a WebAPI that utilizes a request-response model and talks to an application running on a web server using HTTP and JSON. In May 2011, Voxeo launched SMSified, a new service for developers wanting to build inbound and outbound SMS/text messaging applications.[21]

The Voxeo platform is based on open standards like VoiceXML, CCXML, and SIP and the company puts a strong emphasis on standards. Voxeo employee Dan Burnett chairs the W3C Voice Browser Working Group and is Co-Editor-In-Chief of VoiceXML 3. CTO RJ Auburn chairs the W3C CCXML working group.[22]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Voxeo blog: What types of applications do people create with Voxeo platform? - December 29, 2008
  2. ↑ Jonathan Taylor on the Origins and Near-Future of Voxeo - eComm, February 20, 2009
  3. ↑ Voxeo Tries To Untangle Net Phone Mess - Forbes, January 23, 2001November 12, 2001
  4. ↑ Voxeo news release - January 25, 2005
  5. ↑ Voxeo Acquires Vocomo Customer Base and VoiceXML IVR Platform Technology - Speech Tech Magazine, October 1, 2005
  6. ↑ Voxeo Launches European Subsidiary, Hosting Center and Sales Office - Speech Tech Magazine, May 16, 2006
  7. ↑ Voxeo Acquires VoiceReady - TMC IP Communications Community, July 20, 2006
  8. ↑ Voxeo Acquires San Jose-Based Micromethod Technologies - Silicon Valley Wire, August 20, 2008
  9. ↑ Voxeo Acquires VoiceObjects - Information Week, December 9, 2008
  10. ↑ Voxeo Acquires IMified to Add IM Agents to Voice Services - GigaOm May 27, 2009
  11. ↑ Adhearsion + Voxeo = Voxeo Labs (Plus a free trip down memory lane!) - VoIP Insider July 22, 2009
  12. ↑ Voxeo Acquires Motorola's VoiceXML Browser Technology - TechCrunch October 5, 2009
  13. ↑ Orlando-based Voxeo buys Web-meeting site - Orlando Sentinel Jan 20, 2010
  14. ↑ Voxeo Gobbles Up Teleku - GigaOm Aug 11, 2010
  15. ↑ WebForPhone joins expanding Voxeo family - InsideCTI Nov 18, 2010
  16. ↑ Microsoft and Nuance Get Muted By Gartner Magic Quadrant for IVR - Speech Technology Magazine, April 4, 2008
  17. ↑ Voxeo Makes Datamonitor Shortlist of IVR Vendors - TMC IVR Community, May 12, 2009
  18. ↑ Voxeo news release - September 7, 2011
  19. ↑ Voxeo Launches Tropo.com - Opus Research, March 3, 2009
  20. ↑ Voxeo Puts API In The Clouds - Speech Technology Magazine, March 6, 2009
  21. ↑ Voxeo to launch SMSified, will charge 1 cent per text - VentureBeat, May 10, 2011
  22. ↑ CCXML Becomes a Proposed Recommendation - PRWeb - July, 2011

External links

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