Upgrading its free, downloadable platform and touting it as a user-friendly cost-saving measure during this slower economy, an Orlando, Florida-based company today released a new version of its flagship speech, SIP, VoIP and IVR solutions product.

 

Voxeo (News - Alert) Corporation Chief Executive Officer told TMCnet during an interview this morning that today’s early access release of Prophecy 9 marks a “great intersection” of the platform’s availability and businesses’ need to reduce costs.

 

“I think it’s a great intersection with demand that’s going on in the customer base,” Taylor said during an interview. “The economy is slowing. The great thing about IVR and SIP technologies is that, generally speaking, they’re cost-reducing technologies. They really let you run your business and serve your customers at a lower price than you could previously, with a lot of the legacy platforms.”

 

Specifically, Prophecy 9 makes telephony applications “easy to create and deploy,” Voxeo officials say, because it’s built on open, modern standards – as opposed to VoIP platforms that pre-dated technologies such as Java and XML – and is easy to install. The platform comes with two free ports. A testament to the product’s popularity, more than 80,000 ports have been installed in the past year, Voxeo officials say, and 114,000 ports have been installed since 2006.

 

The release comes as Taylor – now attending the SpeechTEK 2008 conference in Manhattan – also announces that Voxeo has purchased SIP-based software maker Micromethod (News - Alert) Technologies. The acquisition is expected to bolster Voxeo’s IVR offerings in a fast-growing market, industry insiders say.

 

Experts also expect today’s Prophecy 9 release to strengthen Voxeo. Dan Miller Sr., an analyst at Opus Research, said that Voxeo is “doing all the right things to reinforce its recent growth trends.”

 

 “Integrating the latest SIP and IMS standards will ease each customer’s transition to VoIP while new tools and dashboards add levels of comfort that come with transparency,” Miller said.

 

Launched in 2000, Prophecy is the lynchpin of what Voxeo officials call their “Evolution” on-demand, hosted, SaaS (News - Alert) IVR and speech platform.

 

Leaders from businesses that use the product hail Prophecy 9 as a highly scalable platform.

 

According to Irv Shapiro (News - Alert), chief executive officer of ifbyphone, Phophecy has supported his company’s deployment of carrier-grade IVR technology into the SMB marketplace over the past year.

 

“As we scale to thousands of ports Phophecy 9 will provide us with the management tools necesary to deliver world-class solutions for businesses of any size,” Shapiro said. “But that is only part of the story. Voxeo’s world-class support completes the equation.”

 

Prophecy 9 includes new SIP APIs and support for Mac OS X and Linux. New features include: “Prophecy Commander,” a new operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning system that lets customers easily deploy and manage telephony applications on a single server, single-site cluster, or multi-site cluster of Prophecy servers; “Prophecy Dashboard,” which provides a comprehensive yet concise overview of the performance of any Prophecy server, server group, virtual platform, or application; and “Prophecy Log Analyst,” which collects and indexes Prophecy generated data and call logs in real time, giving IT staff and developers the ability to search, navigate, analyze, measure, and report statistics, transactions, errors, and more as they occur.

 

For Taylor, Prophecy 9 fulfills the goals that Voxeo set out for itself when it began developing the platform nearly a decade ago.

 

“Reducing the cost and complexity of IVR and speech applications was foremost in our minds when we put the Prophecy product together,” Taylor said. “We believed for many years that, especially on premise, that the extent and difficulty of getting these solutions deployed are just way too high. So Prophecy 9 is the third major release where we’re really focused on reducing those costs and complexities.”

 

Voxeo Corporation is a platinum sponsor of Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO — the biggest and most comprehensive IP communications event of the year.  ITEXPO (News - Alert) will take place in Los Angeles, California, September 16-18, 2008, featuring three valuable days of exhibits, conferences, and networking opportunities you can’t afford to miss. Don’t wait.  Register now!