It used to be that carriers were not so keen on buying web startups’ cloud telephony APIs (application programming interfaces). That appears to be changing, however, as news of new players hitting the playing field grows.
Within a few months, according to Ed Gubbins writing for NPRG.org, “two cloud telephony platform providers bulked up with new waves of investment,” and now another startup is aiming to bring telephony APIs “higher upmarket.”
The players to which Gubbins is referring as having bulked up with new investments are Twilio (News - Alert) and IfbyPhone. The newbie is Plivo. Twilio, which has been in the game since 2008 with a web platform that enables application developers to include telephony functions, grew to 20,000-plus customers and was able to raise $12 million in funding in fall 2010, according to Gubbins. IfbyPhone, which a had acquired CloudVox, http://connectedplanetonline.com/IP-NGN/news/ifbyphone-acquires-cloudvox-0120/index.html a company that allows developers build and host their own voice applications in the cloud, garnered $10 million a few months after that.
When Plivo jumped into the market at the end of May, its founders, who reportedly were inspired by Twilio, had decided on a business model that is not based on minutes like Twilio is. According to Gubbins, Plivo’s business model “will be based on sales to service providers after a commercial version of Plivo’s product debuts in a few months.”
Another differentiator Gubbins highlighted was the fact that Plivo’s telephony platform is not based on Digium’s Asterisk. Describing itself on its website the company states, “Plivo is a Communications Framework to rapidly build voice-based apps, to make or receive calls, using your existing web development skills and your existing infrastructure.” It further explains why its founders decided the development of Plivo was necessary. Acknowledging that Twilio solved the challenge of rapidly writing telephony applications, it stated: “we have always wished that app developers wouldn’t be locked to their services. So we created Plivo – a 100 percent FOSS framework built on the next generation telephony platform FreeSWITCH. While building Plivo, we have consciously kept our APIs as consistent as possible with Twilio – allowing us to reuse Twilio’s helper libraries so that developers can port their existing applications to Plivo with minimal code modification. However, it must be noted that our code base is in no way related to Twilio.”
These factors, to Gubbins’ thinking, may cause developers with smaller-scale needs to be attracted to Twilio and those with larger-scale needs such as call centers and “big enterprise PBXs” and “heavy-duty IVRs” to lean toward Plivo.
Since enterprises are becoming more open to cloud telephony service, the future could be bright for Plivo.
In other news, TMCnet reported Ifbyphone (News - Alert) (News - Alert), a voice-based marketing automation platform, unveiled a new partnership that enables Zendesk clients to integrate the Ifbyphone Widget into their customer support platform.
Linda Dobel is a TMCnet Contributor. She has been an editor in the contact center space for more than 25 years, and has the distinction of being the founding editor of Customer Inter@ction Solutions (CIS) magazine. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Juliana Kenny