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TMCnews Featured Article
December 30, 2009
The Origin of a Strong Company: CallFire's CEO Talks History, and What's Ahead
By Kelly McGuire, TMCnet Editor
December has been a productive month for California-based open-source VoIP consultancy company CallFire.com.
With the company’s release of its Cloud Call Center, it combined time efficiency with the need for polarized politics to cater to the modern day mobile worker.
With the Cloud Call Center, organizations can install a large call center in just a few hours, rather than in days, weeks or months.
To dig deeper to the original roots of how the company began, in a recent interview with TMCnet’s Paula Bernier (News - Alert), CallFire’s Co-Founder and CEO Dinesh Ravishanker, discussed how the company has solidified itself in the VoIP market. In the interview with Bernier, Ravishanker talked about the origin of the company, and its ultimate vision.
“Our organizational vision originally focused on enterprise open source VoIP consulting,” Ravishanker said. “We developed hosted call centers and built significant open source frameworks that could support tens of thousands of simultaneous calls. By leveraging open source, we could build customized telephony solutions that cost a small fraction of what existing telecom companies were charging.”
Targeting the SMB, call center and non-profit markets, the company’s clients – as they evolved along with the CallFire enterprise itself – demanded a highly available, redundant platform that could be used over multiple data centers to handle thousands of calls.
“These requirements made the case for developing high-availability clusters, intelligent queuing systems across multiple data centers, and self-healing media servers,” Ravishanker said. “This platform is the present-day CallFire.”
While present day CallFire seems to be rock solid and seemingly well received – CallFire won ITEXPO (News - Alert) West’s Best Call Center 2009 Award – Bernier asked the CEO what to expect for the future of CallFire.
“CallFire will continue to build next-generation communications tools using the latest in open source technologies,” Ravishanker said. “We’re investing in mobile app development, Google (News - Alert) Wave integration and much more.”
With the company’s release of its Cloud Call Center, it combined time efficiency with the need for polarized politics to cater to the modern day mobile worker.
With the Cloud Call Center, organizations can install a large call center in just a few hours, rather than in days, weeks or months.
To dig deeper to the original roots of how the company began, in a recent interview with TMCnet’s Paula Bernier (News - Alert), CallFire’s Co-Founder and CEO Dinesh Ravishanker, discussed how the company has solidified itself in the VoIP market. In the interview with Bernier, Ravishanker talked about the origin of the company, and its ultimate vision.
“Our organizational vision originally focused on enterprise open source VoIP consulting,” Ravishanker said. “We developed hosted call centers and built significant open source frameworks that could support tens of thousands of simultaneous calls. By leveraging open source, we could build customized telephony solutions that cost a small fraction of what existing telecom companies were charging.”
Targeting the SMB, call center and non-profit markets, the company’s clients – as they evolved along with the CallFire enterprise itself – demanded a highly available, redundant platform that could be used over multiple data centers to handle thousands of calls.
“These requirements made the case for developing high-availability clusters, intelligent queuing systems across multiple data centers, and self-healing media servers,” Ravishanker said. “This platform is the present-day CallFire.”
While present day CallFire seems to be rock solid and seemingly well received – CallFire won ITEXPO (News - Alert) West’s Best Call Center 2009 Award – Bernier asked the CEO what to expect for the future of CallFire.
“CallFire will continue to build next-generation communications tools using the latest in open source technologies,” Ravishanker said. “We’re investing in mobile app development, Google (News - Alert) Wave integration and much more.”
Kelly McGuire is a TMCnet Web editor, covering CRM and workforce technologies, and anchor of its daily TMC Newsroom video broadcast. Kelly also writes about eco-friendly "green" technologies and smart grids, compiling TMCnet's weekly e-Newsletters on those topics, as well as the cable industry. To read more of Kelly's articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Kelly McGuire
