The CTO of Voxeo, Jonathan Taylor, talks about the merging of the Internet and telephony applications
AS THE PRESIDENT and CTO of a start-up company that is trying to pioneer a new space as a telephony service provider, Jonathan Taylor has his work cut out for him. The core mission of Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Voxeo is to lay an interface based on Internet standards on top of the maze of interfaces that drive most of today's telecommunications applications.
In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Taylor describes how Internet technologies can be used to significantly expand the base of developers that will help turn the Internet into a platform for telephony applications.
I started a company in 1995, called IRDG, that created the first Internet unified messaging solution. That was an interesting experience for us because we were really Internet people. We had been guys that had used the Internet for a long time, and we were used to that way of doing things. So dealing with the telephone, the telephone companies, the terminology, the complexity, and the lead times just absolutely blew us away. It was a very painful lesson. We sold that company to Media Gate in 1997, and I was the CTO at Media Gate for two years.
InfoWorld: What makes the development of telecommunications applications so complex?
Taylor: There are all these arcane APIs, and there have been 10 years of standards battles with no winners. It's like the Middle East of APIs, and it's not getting better.
InfoWorld: What impact has that had on the development of applications?
Taylor: In my estimation, there are really only a few thousand qualified computer telephony developers in the U.S.; so, not only are these APIs arcane, it's not something that you can learn easily, and there are not that many qualified people available.
What we do is take everything about the telephone and wrap it in Web technology so that normal Web developers can drive the telephone infrastructure.
InfoWorld: Why did you also build a service to support your toolset?
Taylor: If you could imagine if everyone that wanted to put up a Web site had to still get their own T1 line, router, or Web server, there'd be dramatically fewer Web sites and services.
So we have a predeployed infrastructure that has the technology to connect from the phone side to the Web side so that our customers don't have to buy and deploy and manage all that stuff.
Access to that infrastructure for development and creation and testing of applications is absolutely free. You can go to our Web site, create an account, get phone numbers, hook them up to URLs where your applications are, and go. We have over 500 developers today in our community program who are doing just that.
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