ZDNet blogger Dana Blankenhorn posed this question in his post “Can open source take down Ribbit?”. Dana said:

So how tough would it be to build something like Ribbit, based on Appcelerator, and distribute that under the GPL? That would certainly get the frog into someone’s throat.

Dana says that Ribbit’s cool and I agree. The concept of a new telephone company is not really new. In fact, part of what Vonage and others like Vocalocity have been doing for awhile now are part of trying to re-invent the telephone company as we know it. We know it as cold, proprietary and stock full of cash. As of recent years, we also remember them as part of litigations such as with MCI, massive consolidation back into Ma Bell, and way behind the rest of the world in getting high-speed Internet access into our homes. I’m sure Judge Greene never imagined the break up would come back around to this.

Ribbit is adding their name to the attempt to re-invent the telephone company and dubbs their company “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company” and has the following statement on their front page:

Ribbit is a new kind of Phone Company, born from the realization that legacy phone companies are not going to bring us the communication innovation we are all looking for.

That’s a bold statement and exciting at the same time. It also happens to be true, at least the part of the realization.

But was about Dana’s question about an open source alternative to Ribbit?

First, all of the components needed to build an open source Ribbit are already in place and in fact have been so for awhile. There’s also some not-fully-open-source-but-open-standards alternatives that could be used quite readily and that my previous company had been involved in developing for a number of years.

So, the ingredients:

First, add CCXML, VoiceXML and SIP. Voxeo offers a great standards based server that has all 3 of these ingredients backed in as part of their Prophecy platform. You can even get a free, 2 port version of their software to download or build and run your apps in their network.

Second, add Appcelerator RIA + SOA services to enable communication to Voxeo over standard HTTP. In fact, we’ve SOA-enabled CCXML/VoiceXML in conjunction with one of our System Integration partners, Newfound Communications and deployed 2 large Voxeo-based telephony projects using next generation web as the front-end interface. One of the systems is doing over $2M per week in transactions. You can bring the power of web 2.0 to telephony 2.0 and create compelling applications.

Third, add Mashups to your applications like integration with Salesforce.com or a variety of other sources to create a compelling integration of enterprise data, your phone and your web content.

OK, so this isn’t so much an open source play. Or is it? These bits above represent a set of commercial applications using both open standards and open source technologies. If you could pull together the pieces of the ecosystem – you could create an interesting Ribbit-in-the-wild (open source) play.

Or, another possibility is using Appcelerator RIA+SOA and enabling this using Asterisk. Asterisk is SIP-based and could easily be used because of it’s large open source community to create an interesting Rabbit open source play. Appcelerator RIA could be used to build the front-end and SOA-enablement bits with Asterisk handling the telephony bits. Both Asterisk and Appcelerator are also GPL.

Anyone interested? Let me know.

Tech Tags: appcelerator asterisk voicexml ccxml sip voxeo ribbit

If you want to completely by-pass the traditional phone company and receive a kick-ass business phone system – without the hassle of buying PBXs and getting circuits – you should really look into Vocalocity right now.

A little background first. About a year ago, the company known as Vocalocity and Zivva merged to form the new Vocalocity as it stands today. I was the founder and CTO of Vocalocity and we were squarely focused on building the next generation telecommunications platform and licensing it to software providers on an OEM basis. We had made great traction in the market with customers such as Microsoft and Siemens. Zivva was an VoIP platform provider and had made great traction in building out a IP-PBX platform and needed to upgrade their technology. Thus, the merger.

However, when we moved into our new office in Buckhead about a little over a month ago – I decided (like an idiot) to listen to the building owners and try and get a deal with the provider that was already in the building. I was sold on the speed of having the suite pre-wired and ready to go. I signed a contract – honestly, too busy with many other things and thinking it was a slam dunk based on the premise. Boy, how wrong I was. 4 1/2 weeks later with no phones – and a very unhappy set of people that couldn’t talk with customers – I was desperate. We needed to find a phone system and we needed it fast.

I turned to Vocalocity after continuing to hear about how great they were doing. I decided to cold-call the 1-800 # and try it out as a normal customer would. And, I must say – the response and turnaround was incredible. Incredible. You might think I’m biased because of my previous involvement. But, honestly, I wasn’t.

We spoke with Vocalocity at 2:30pm after finding out from our current provider that they still were unable to tell us (after 4 1/2 weeks) when we’d get our circuit and phones installed. Within an hour, we have a very detailed quote and selection of phones and features and ordered everything. By 9a.m. THE NEXT MORNING, we had 12 phones and dial-tone. We simply had to plug the phones in to our CAT-5 jacks in all our offices and cubes and then we had a very simple, web-based UI for configuring the voicemail and extensions. I promise you – it was that fast and that simple.

Now, I’ve had been deep in the telecom industry for the past 6 years. I’m pretty much out of it today. I can tell you, this just isn’t typical. My experience with our previous provider of waiting around with empty promises and B.S. is. That’s the normal telco experience. You wait, you big, you plead. Nothing happens. It’s been largely the result of big companies and monopolies.

Not anymore. Vocalocity is redefining that. What they’re doing – is making it work the way it should be. This experience is how it should work. Vocalocity is proving that you can deliver quality customer service and a quality telephone system that exceeds the expectation of customers. I wish Boris and team the best of luck. I’m now their biggest fan and loyalty customer.

Tech Tags: vocalocity vocalocitypbx pbx voip phonesystem

Sounds like a recent rumor I heard from a close source a while back was true. Mark Spencer, founder and creator of Asterisk and CEO of Digium is moving aside to become the CTO according to Jeremy McNamara’s blog post. That’s not at all surprising given their recent investment from Matrix Partners. The rumor was the past several months have been painful as David Skok was urging him to bring in some top talent to turn the open source project into a real business. Given David’s recent involvement in the acquisition of JBoss by RedHat, I’m sure he’s following a specific game plan. However, Mark was fighting this and a number of top JBoss executives and key developers have been rumored to interview with Mark – with no success and all being left with the feeling of “amateur hour” – and an ego much worse than the famous Marc Fleury. And that’s pretty bad.

The technology of Asterisk has a lot of potential and is shaking up the telecommunications space. However, in my opinion and based on experience, it’s currently a big blob of crap and needs a lot of professional development help. Unlike JBoss, Asterisk is truely a hack. JBoss, like any open source project that has many developers working on it, also has its own set of issues – but I must say that for all the core people that have and continue to work on open source: they are professional and very good developers and architects. JBoss has a discipline for working hard to make it work with high quality. You might disagree with their approach, their implementation or even their cause – but if you understand the product and code well enough as I do, you have to agree it’s top notch.

Dig through the Asterisk code base. Oh my. Not only is it completely unmanageable and unreadable (partly because it’s put together using archaic C programming language) – it’s also wraught with memory leaks, crashes and just completely hacked out logic and patches. I’m sure they’re working hard to turn it into a real professional open source product, but they have a long way to go.

And what’s up with the new CEO – Danny Windham – from Adtran? OK, I get the parallels to the Digium board business, but c’mon. Adtran, the manufacturer of network access products like CSUs and Muxes? I’m not sure Adtran even knows what SIP is these days, nevertheless open source. Don’t get me wrong, they make decent products for that sector. But I guess David couldn’t find anybody good enough to go to Alabama to build an open source company. Hopefully, though, Danny will bring some level of professionalism and business to the Asterisk project and turn it into a real product. I think that would be good for everyone.
technorati tags: asterisk, digium, adtran, markspencer, sip, opensource

This is a question I have been pondering lately. I’m not as active in the speech industry these days – for several reasons. I won’t entirely list them here, I’ll save that for another post one day. However, one reason is because I believe the speech industry is stagnated a bit and isn’t enjoying the growth we’re seeing in other technology sectors. I am however still watching the industry and still involved loosely with a few projects.

Today, I received my normal email solicitation from Bill Meisel. Bill is a legend in the Speech Recognition world if you don’t already know him. He’s currently an analyst and runs a firm called TMA Associates and publishes a newsletter titled “Speech Strategy News”. Today’s brief email said the following:

Apple’s iPhone is a well-publicized example of the changes in telephony. On the device side, the wireless phone is migrating into all all-purpose portable assistant and entertainment center. Communications infrastructure is also getting a makeover with the integration of the telephone and other communications modalities using Web and network standards. Ad-supported services, including directory assistance and information portals, are making telephony even more analogous to the developments in the Web world.

But the Web analogy can be taken too far. The Graphical User Interface that served the PC and Web world so well has obvious limitations on mobile devices with small screens and clumsy text-input modes. Any phone can call a network-based service and immediately have a Voice User Interface using speech recognition, and that VUI is the same on any phone. This creates opportunities that some companies are already beginning to exploit for services to consumers and businesses. Call centers will soon find that free directory assistance and other trends increase the number of calls and change their nature. Company telephone systems are also evolving into Unified Communications systems, and speech technology makes the many features of such systems usable. Speech technology can also automate field forces using only cell phones.

Do speech recognition and other speech technologies work? Yes, despite a tendency to paint anything short of human abilities as a limitation. When implemented well and used in appropriate applications, the technology is extremely effective. And the many successful deployed applications prove it.

Bill’s right about how much a device can be limited compared to the offering of an in-network speech recognition application. Speech recognition applications can also enjoy a lot of the benefits of a web application, especially when built on a VoiceXML (and CCXML and other related web standards) architecture.

But what’s the hangup for the industry? Why the slow down?

It seems, like usual, there are always a multiple of reasons – many of which are timing, technology, finance and just pure circumstantial – all of which are uncontrollable. However, I believe there are a couple of reasons that are addressable by the industry as a whole.
First part, the pricing doesn’t work.

Lucky for Nuance these days, they’re not only the 800 lb gorilla – they’re really the only significant player left in the marketplace as far as real speech recognition and text-to-speech product offerings go. They’re the monopoly player in the speech space, and they’re really exploiting that advantage from a distribution and pricing standpoint. They’re going to extract as much from that position in terms of power and pricing as they can. Ultimately, I believe, to their detriment – or better said, to the reduction of their own marketplace.
Speech has always been a “nice to have” – not because you can’t build compelling applications that reduce cost. Not because you can’t craft a compelling ROI. Mike Dickerson, my previous co-founder at Vocalocity (which we are no longer at), always use to say that speech suffers from the “I” part of the ROI being “too expensive” to get to the “return on” part of ROI. In other words, if the investment is so large that you have to risk the return, it’s no longer compelling and just increases the risk that you were hoping to mitigate in the business case. Speech is just too expensive. Speech, except for a few applications, is a nice-to-have, it’s a luxury item – it’s nice technology, but only for the chosen few. It really helps and generally people like it – if you are willing to spend more to get it. In every case I was involved in, once you got it deployed and working, they loved it. You just had to justify the cost first, and build a business case that made sense. That seemed to always be the hardest with a nice-to-have technology like speech recognition.

Unfortunately, as the web continues to be more pervasive and ubiquitous, it continues to be just as fast, far less risky and much less expensive than voice. And Bill is right, “the web analogy can be taken too far”. People should stop trying to make the voice web fit the visual web. However, what I think we’re seeing, is the interactive web is making it more difficult to justify (at the current pricing) the voice web. Of course, I’m not trying to say the voice web is necessarily going away – that would be silly. However, with email, IM, SMS and web browsers built directly into these devices – and with the availability of wi-fi networks everywhere – it’s almost impossible to not have access to the Web, when needed. Also, as more and more software is deployed over the web as services using a modern browser, you almost don’t even have to have your own computer to gain access to necessary data and applications anymore (Another early justification for the phone and VoiceXML, that’s losing ground).

So how do you change this? Lowering pricing is certainly one way. I think you’d start to see, over a period of time, the ability to make speech more dominant in phone applications. However, you have to couple that with a healthy eco-system and partner base of developers to get innovative applications conceived, developed and deployed. And that leads to the second issue…

Second part, the ecosystem isn’t healthy.

The voice ecosystem has been dying in the past 2-3 years. The evidence of this is that many small to mid-size companies (in relative terms to the industry itself) have merged with larger companies. SpeechWorks was bought by Scansoft and then Scansoft and Nuance merged into Nuance after many years of fierce competition. VoiceGenie was acquired by Genesys Labs, which was also the acquirer of Telera. Numerous smaller companies are either getting collapsed by larger companies or they’re simply going away. Several smaller companies such as Voxeo and Angel.com seem to really be making serious headway in their businesses (I will say because I believe they’ve embraced the web model directly) and are growing significantly. However, the sign of so much merger mania really is the fall out of the fact that the “speech industry” isn’t there. It’s not big enough, it’s not compelling enough, and hard enough to maintain on its own. Speech really is just (or really should be) another technology feature of an interactive application. And, to make matters worse, even the industry conference and magazine recently merged with a larger conference as John Kelly sold SpeechTek to Information Today. Mergers can be good. In this case, they’re the direct reaction to survival. You must merge to stay alive and in most of these cases, that’s the underlying reason. Heck, even Intel sold off its telecommunications unit, Dialogic, to another smaller company, Eicon Networks – and Brooktrout (the Dialogic competitor) has merged with Excel Switching to become Cantata. While they’re not speech only companies, everyone in the industry recognizes them as major players in the industry. (By the way, these are just a few mergers, there have been many, many more such as Intervoice and Edify or the shocking IP Unity and Glenayre).

If you’re in to “reading the tealeaves”, another interesting note is how many people are “leaving” the industry. Or, maybe not really leaving, but relocating to bigger opportunities, whether that be directly or indirectly related to the “speech industry”. Industry veteran and ex co-founder and CTO of Snowshore and CTO of Cantata just left this past week to join BEA as Deputy CTO. Smart move in my opinion given the state of everything that’s going on there and in the industry. Of course, numerous other people have joined Google in the past 2 years from the industry.
So, where is the industry headed?

Gosh, if I knew that, I’d still be in the industry and probably be an analyst, or better yet, a billionaire.

There are a lot of changing dynamics in the “speech industry”. The 800 lb gorilla is small in relative terms, they have a $2B market cap and did almost $400M in 2006. But, they also have a fairly diverse portfolio of products such as scanners and dictation, of which speech recognition is only one part.

For many years, we’ve thought IBM and Microsoft would get serious and get into the business. They’ve made some decent steps forward, but nothing serious yet.

Like we’ve said in the past, maybe 2007 will be the year… (But, don’t bet on it)

technorati tags: speech, voicexml, ccxml, nuance, cantata, bea, asr, tts

I got notified today by the RFC Editor of the IETF that one of the specifications I co-authored with Dave Burke of Voxpilot, Mark Scott of Genesys Labs, RJ Auburn of Voxeo and Scott McGlashan of HP last year has been published as an informational draft and now available.  The draft is called draft-burke-vxml-02.txt.
In the specification, we described a standard mechanism for a SIP interface to VoiceXML media services, which is commonly employed between application servers and media servers offering VoiceXML processing capabilities. Many of the modern VoiceXML browsers support a SIP interface – however, at the time, each of them had a different way to address them, how they dealt with media and how data was passed back and forth. In this specification, we tried to lay out a standard way that all VoiceXML Browsers supporting SIP should implement.

I’m not as active in the VoiceXML or W3C community as I have been in the past 5 years – however, I recently began a very interested project for a call center doing an Ajax, Web 2.0 enabled Agent Desktop and using VoiceXML and CCXML for the backend. We’re using the Voxeo software to build the application. It’s been fun getting back involved with these types of capabilities – but what is most interesting is the merging of modern web capabilities with next generation telecom and IVR to build a next generation call center application. This makes Asterisk look like a play toy. We’re using our new open source framework, called Seam(less), to rapidly built the application and integrate it into the Voxeo CCXML platform in a very unique way. I’m hoping that we’ll have the opportunity to open source some of the messaging we’ve built from the Seam(less) message broker to the Voxeo CCXML Event I/O interface. It’s truly a very interesting and powerful integration.

technorati tags: ietf, sip, call, control, ccxml, vxml, voicexml, voxeo, hp, genesys, voxpilot, seamless, asterisk, voip

Two major stories in the speech industry which I think are showing some overall trends to the speed of adoption of new technology and the overall proof that speech is not an industry, but a type of feature or application in an overall customer interaction use case:

Today, Intel and Eicon announced Eicon would buy the older Dialogic communications business unit.

You can read a little bit about it from CNET’s News.com.

Why is this important to the industry? Well, it’s not entirely a speech only business unit – in fact, I would bet a very, very small fraction of the company’s revenue has been impacted by speech recognition. Exactly my point. Most telephone applications today are still DTMF and will be for a long time.

Dialogic was rumored for a long time to be on the block – and the acquirer was for a long time rumored to be Cantata, the combination of Excel Switching and Brooktrout. Brooktrout was a competitor to Dialogic and another manufacturer of old telephony PC boards. However, Brooktrout’s revenue is largely FAX based as it dominates the US Fax market with a very large percentage. Excel also has a long tradition in older telephony manufacturing but not in traditional PC boards, but in larger scale, higher density “iron chassis”. Big boxes that plug in to your carrier’s facility to deliver all sorts of protocol switching such as converting from one very old TDM protocol to the next. The merger bills itself as being able to bridge the gap from the old (and profitable!) to the new (and not yet so profitable, but cool, like IMS!).

Eicon must have really impressed Intel and offered more money than the privately-held Cantata. However, I’m not sure I would personally want to be part of the combination. Eicon also manufactures older fax and telephony PC boards and a acquired Shiva awhile back (remeber the older VPN appliances during the dot com heyday?). So, if Brooktrout went for $172M, how much did Dialogic go for?

Eicon is a good company with lots of nice people. However, they’ve been late to the game with SIP and all over the map with their portfolio, including trying to have yet-another-Microsoft Speech Server TIM. It will be interesting to see how they absorb nearly 600 Dialogic engineers as they try and merge the 2 aging technologies in the age of SIP, Internet protocols, and Web 2.0.

Microsoft Speech Server reborn as Office Communication Server

Opus Research has a short advisory on this announcement.

Is this shocking? Well, not so much. It could either be yet another Microsoft branding event for mid-2006 (although they must not be fully part of the bigger MSFT branding play with everything being re-branded “Live” these days) — or — it’s just another notch in MSFT slowly starting to bring speech into the Operating System and the mainstream server line. Again, this makes sense. Speech in MSFT is just an interface, a modality, a progamming pattern, a feature or another way of interacting with a user. If MSFT can integrate speech into the main stream work flow of business communications — and make it affordable and easy to program for the masses -they’ll win, regardless of how sexy speech wants to be.

I love speech, don’t get me wrong. I love the whole idea of being able to have a natural conversation with a machine, and having it do what I want it to. That’s probably why I like to program them so much.


Me: Human
You: Computer.

You do what I say (and sometimes, that's not fair as I'm a human and very imperfect darnnit!).


SpeechTek Fall 2006 was this week!

How absolutely depressing since this is probably the first time in 4 years that I’ve not been and had a speaking spot…. Rambling about speech was going to change the world.

Oh well…. Life moves on.

This is probably the last time for awhile I’ll focus on blogging about Speech, VoiceXML, CCXML and SIP for while. I’ve started a new venture with a couple of buddies from Vocalocity called Hakano. It’s not yet ready and we’re hoping to launch a private beta in September. I hope that we can start blogging about it in the next 2 weeks and start showing some private screenshots and screencasts of the next big thing. I can’t wait. Until, then…..

Technorati Tags: speech, eicon, dialogic, intel, cantata,microsoft

If you have not already heard, today ZiVva annouced the acquisition of Vocalocity. You can read the press release to get a little more information.

This does mark the end to my involvement with Vocalocity. It is a very bitter sweet ending. I would like to thank Jim White of Sutter Hill Ventures, Mike von Grey of Revenue Med, Kelly Conway of eLoyalty, Sig Mosely of Imlay Investments, Said Mohammadioun, Lou Santora and all the other close advisors of the company, employees and investors – and most of all, I would like to thank Mike Dickerson, my partner and loyal friend for 5 tough and rewarding years at Vocalocity. I will forever be indebted to you and all the people that made Vocalocity a success.

At Vocalocity, we had the concept of taking complex and ever changing communications standards such as VoiceXML, CCXML and SIP, to name a few, and making software that completely followed the standard and that was available on an OEM basis to larger customers. To name a few: Microsoft, IBM, Aspect and Siemens. We also strongly believed that standards in the communications world would completely disrupt their proprietary cousins, over time. Time being the operative word. Standards have taken over, but at at rate that is hard to track. SIP has become so mainstream that some of the largest carriers in the world are using it natively. VoiceXML has completely taken over the IVR and next generation interactive voice application space. MRCP is now the de-facto specification for interfacing with a speech server.

However, standards also have competition – not just from big companies like Microsoft who sometimes choose not to follow them (or better, extend and embrace them). For example, Skype is the world’s largest VoIP network – and they don’t use SIP – at least not natively. And you can’t say that’s because they have a legacy application problem – they’re somewhat a new company dispite their size.

Some of the frustration that I always felt as part of my involvement in the standards process is that they move too slow. Slow on purpose, I understand. But sometimes, too slow for any good. Technology is evolving at a breakneck pace – and standards need to evolve on a more practical timeframe, not a timeframe that is suitable for a large research organization. The IETF is quite dramatically different than the W3C in this regard. While the W3C moves like a glacier, the IETF moves like a startup. IETF drafts expire every 6 months, forcing momentum. But causing lots of drafts that sometimes have not much change. On the other hand, how many different SIP extension drafts exist? A lot and that causes some fragmentation.

I don’t claim to have any answers or even plausible suggestions – even after 4 years of standards work. But, it needs to be examined.

To all the former employees of Vocalocity, you’ll always be near and dear to my heart for your hard work, dedication and friendship. I wish everyone the best of luck in the future and hope we can work together again. Please keep in touch.

Technorati Tags: vocalocity, zivva, voicexml, ccxml, sip, ietf, w3c, mrcp

My wife tonight used a neat, new service from a company called Unwired Buyer.

It works like this:

1. Create an account at https://www.unwiredbuyer.com/ and setup your ebay id. You pick a 4-digit pin when you sign up.
2. 3 minutes before your auction ends, you’ll get a call on your mobile phone (or whatever phone you setup) – it will ask you to enter your pin.
3. The service will tell you if you’re the highest bidder, and if not, will allow you to continue bidding over the phone until the auction ends. You can remain on the phone while the bid continues.

I think this is yet another great example of Web2.0 + Voice convergence. Nobody will think of this as an IVR application. However, it’s very sexy, uses all the same technology and actually solves a real problem with immediacy.

My belief is that we will see a lot of these types of applications over the next few years as the phone continues to be the predominant personal communication device. Smart services will continue to flurish and they will get more sophisticated, more natural and will start to mix presence, location awareness, workflow and personalization.

Technorati Tags: ebay, unwired, voice, ivr, web2.0

The JBoss guys have released a pretty nice new product, (well, at least it’s a new name), called the JBoss Collaboration Server.

What would really be nice would be to add Voice features to the collaboration suite, something that both Microsoft and Siemens have done to their respective competitive products. This would provide a nice alternative to Asterisk, one which could be based on a Java specification (JSR-116 or the new upcoming JSR-289), and one which would be based on standards such as VoiceXML, CCXML and MRCP.

But, then again, that would require JBoss to enter the telecom space I suppose and that might be challenging for them as Ken Lee’s pointed out in his blog about JBoss-based HotSip. JBoss only has one real telecom evangelist, Ivelin Ivanov. But Ivelin’s Mobicents has almost no play inside of the JBoss mind-meld it seems on the surface — to no fault of Ivelin’s I would suspect.

Maybe JBoss+RedHat should buy Asterisk? That would combine two large open source communities – sure – but would be somewhat of a technical disaster. The Asterisk codebase is horrible and pretty unstable. It’s also C (not even fully C++) and would be difficult to merge into the JBoss codebase, which of course is Java, and fairly next generation.

Technorati Tags: jboss, sip, voip, redhat, asterisk, java

Using state charts or modeling tools like UML aren’t really anything new – part of developing a VoiceXML, CCXML or SIP application these days is about managing and coordinate states. It’s not always fun, can be largely redundant and causes wicked, hard to find bugs in application development.

The W3C Voice Browser Working Group is working on a new programming language called State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction (SCXML) which is modeled after Harel State Charts. Jim Barnett of Aspect Software is the lead Editor and an extremely bright individual.

Lots of the core language of the VoiceXML FIA and the CCXML EHIA is largely driven by state. CCXML itself is really a state machine application. The VoiceXML application you typically would author is really no more than a finite state machine, at least at this point in the evolution of modern dialog systems. So, why SCXML and how is it affecting VXML and CCXML? SCXML is an attempt to refactor part of the common capabilities and requirements of the language into another language that is common and specific to this cause. A good reason to refactor. Also, VoiceXML 3.0 will have additional requirements and having an ability to mix CCXML and VoiceXML applications using a unified state representation allows better applications, more modular applications and applications which can focus on the domain rather than the form.

Enter a new (yet old) player in the area: AT&T and Call Advantage. They have years of experience working in the real world building a very complex SIP based system which is not your grandfather’s phone system. They have recently introduced the results of their research in a new project called echarts. What’s interesting here is that there is a lot to learn from their experience building highly state driven, very dynamic features in SIP. There system has allowed them to layer sophisticated feature interaction and do it in a way which scales in a large environment with many subscribers.

We should look at how we can leverage their work as part of SCXML.