At a recent Gartner symposium, analyst Bob Hafner advised customers not to invest in expensive desk phones with large displays. Deploy a softphone instead, because deskphones will be gone in five to ten years. Andy Abramson teases that theme out a little further, noting that many Voice 2.0 capabilities can be had without replacing existing networks.  Russell Shaw chimes in with the observation that there’s great value in information derived from calling patterns. Indeed!
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This is a picture of the iotum Relevance Engine.  Notice the dashed line on the left side connecting into a blob labelled “softswitch, IP-PBX, or Media Gateway”. It’s an XML-RPC interface between the network element and iotum, which means that it can be used by just about anything, and not just the three network elements I’ve identified. It could also have the word Service Control Point in there if you wanted to deploy it in the existing telephone network. Or, for that matter, you could add “Mobile” to that mix. We’ve done experimental work with deploying interfaces to the Relevance Engine on mobile handsets as well. Or, “Application”… if you wanted to add our capabilities to another application — say a specialized terminal or a conference calling system. Or “Website”…  In other words, we’re network, terminal, and server agnostic. As I said last week at the Voice 2.0 conference in Ottawa, iotum is built for mash-ups.Â
Today, distribution of applications to telephony users is largely controlled by the incumbents, because they control the network. However, (a) some people will put call control applications on handsets and (b) regulations require incumbents to give network access to third parties at reasonable prices.Â
There is no reason Voice 2.0 applications have to wait for the incumbents. We can all get started today.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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