Adhearsion + Voxeo = Voxeo Labs (Plus a free trip down memory lane!)

In what appears to be more a merger of technology firms with common agendas than a traditional acquisition, next-gen telephony upstarts Adhearsion and Voxeo have joined forces to create Voxeo Labs.

If you are not familiar with Voxeo, you haven’t been doing your homework. Voxeo is a growing ASP provider leveraging VoiceXML and other technologies to provide cloud-based IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and VoIP platforms, along with autonomous, self-service tools for users to create and deploy their own applications. If you are new to the VoIP Insider, you may have missed our past coverage of Adhearsion. Adhearsion mashes Ruby on Rails with open source telephony creating a new framework for voice application development and delivery. Their own website contains a much more succinct distillation of what they do:

Adhearsion is a new way to write voice-enabled applications. It’s not just an API or library — it’s a fully-featured framework, the first of its kind, designed for maximal code reuse and intuitiveness. The name “Adhearsion” is a combination of “adhesion” and “hear” because Adhearsion shines best when integrating technologies with voice.

Additionally, the newly formed Voxeo Labs will be actively collaborating with Tropo, a commercial, cloud-based telephony application platform powered by Voxeo.

{TANGENT} I can remember coding and selling IVR and Speech applications as an early hire of ASP telephony pioneer IVR, Inc., now a part of France based services firm Prosodie. This is where my apparently lifelong interest in things like VoIP and telephony were kindled, compiling DTMF driven IVR applications and stepping through their execution line by line as they unfolded. Heady times indeed. Seems like a looong time ago, but it wasn’t really that long ago at all, less than ten years in fact. Our main business was the customized development and delivery of hosted IVR and Speech applications, leveraging a scalable yet somewhat monolithic and ridiculously expensive Dialogic platform, coding applications using VB and Visual Voice. Many of the applications we wrote are still in service today. Heck, pushing call detail reporting, survey results, transcription and other captured data to the web and accessing non-local databases was a big deal for us back then. Kid stuff these days.

Bear witness to the rich media extravaganza that was our corporate website….circa 2000….fully locked and loaded, complete with Y2K compliance in case you were concerned.

Even back then we could see the potential of VoiceXML, which was just starting to emerge as we were exiting the market via an acquisition. There weren’t really any flexible and affordable, open-source tools such as Asterisk to work with. All of our services, although very progressive for the era, were restricted to the old fashioned PSTN. I recall a basic channelized T1, even with the secret handshake rate would run you around $800 per month. Then you needed an $8000 server and a $5000 ISA card to plug that expensive T1 into. Don’t forget a few grand more for Windows Server and SQL. For entrepreneurs these days looking to get into the voice game, nearly all barriers to entry, financial and otherwise, are quickly being removed.

Way back then we envisioned fully automated, self-service tools that would allow our customers to create and maintain their own voice applications, and we likely would have gotten there in short order had the company not been acquired by a larger firm. It’s satisfying to see the sharp minds at Adhearsion and Voxeo continuing to push the boundaries, creating an elegant amalgam of web and voice far beyond what we dreamed of a decade ago. My hats off to you.{/TANGENT}

The full text of the Voxeo/Adhearsion press release is below.

Founders of Adhearsion Join Voxeo To Create New Developer and Open-Source Focused Silicon Valley Innovation Lab

San Jose, Calif. (PRWEB) July 22, 2009 — Today at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Voxeo, a leading provider of Unified Communications and Self-Service platforms, announced the launch of Voxeo Labs. Voxeo Labs will invest in core platform research, incubate revolutionary ideas and innovate new communications solutions. All products and services released by Voxeo Labs will be based on open standards and made available under community-centered open-source licenses.

“The inspiration for creating Voxeo Labs comes from the incredibly rich history of innovation and discovery at Bell Labs- the seminal R&D think tank in the communications world. Bell Labs has impacted technology, and consequently everyday life, in ways few others groups ever have,” said Jonathan Taylor, Voxeo CEO. “The last 10 years have seen enormous adoption of open standard and open-source telephony platforms, and we see developer-focused open-source innovation driving communications forward for many years to come. Voxeo Labs is a key investment in that future.”

Jay Phillips and Jason Goecke, leaders of Adhearsion, are joining Voxeo Labs full-time as founding staff. Adhearsion is an open-source, full-featured communications framework designed for maximum code reuse and intuitiveness. Powered by the Ruby programming language, Adhearsion launched just three years ago and has since become the most widely used open-source telephony application framework. Voxeo is now the primary sponsor of Adhearsion and will invest significantly in its growth and developer community. Adhearsion will continue to run on top of the Asterisk open-source PBX platform and will soon add support for Voxeo’s Tropo cloud telephony service.

Voxeo Labs will launch several new open-source and open standards communications solutions over the next year.

“Development of emerging communications applications has long needed a center of gravity, and Voxeo is making the investment in people and resources to spur innovation and become that center,” said Dan Miller, Senior Analyst at Opus Research. “The announcement at O’Reilly’s OSCON reflects commitment to open-source software, services and tools that will benefit Voxeo’s customers and the developer community at large.”

About Voxeo
Voxeo makes Unified Communications and Self-Service applications easy to build and deploy. The company’s common sense approach isn’t rocket science: Create exceptionally great products. Make them exceedingly easy to try, buy and use. Deliver them with extreme support. This approach has made Voxeo the leading choice for enterprises and developers that prefer powerful simplicity where expensive complexity once reigned. More than 45,000 customers – including half of the Fortune 100 – use Voxeo’s SIP-powered products and services to deliver innovative IVR, VoIP, outbound notification, and unified communications solutions. All of Voxeo’s products and services are available for free development and trial use at www.voxeo.com/free.
Voxeo is an employee-owned company with headquarters in Orlando, Beijing, Cologne and London. Voxeo’s Prophecy IVR Platform includes the worlds only 100% certified compliant VoiceXML browser. Voxeo’s Prophecy IVR Hosting service is the largest in the world and the only one backed by a 100% uptime guarantee. For more information visit www.voxeo.com.