We’ve capitalized on our ability to be nimble and fast to market with new functionality. This gives us a distinct advantage over the carriers that can only “move their ship only 10 or 20 degrees” Thank God for the “jetskiers” that are hard at work creating new and innovative ways to use the phone. The Broadsoft facebook connector can connect vast markets to our company. However, new and really cool apps like I saw at web 2.0 in SF last week are still being created everyday without a telephony component. That oversight must be corrected soon. We can bring a market to a developer, help them monetize it and put it into the market in a very short time.

Web 2.0 needs a voice. SimpleSignal intends to give it one.

I got into the VoIP development space about 4 years ago while working for a carrier. After leaving the carrier awhile back I started developing applications against the knowledge that I had learned.

You’re right, it’s not easy to monetize apps or to get carriers on board with your ideas. From my point of view I’m not as much interested in actually getting carriers on board with the mashup(s), because unless it really boosts their core business (and revenue) they won’t touch it.

However, carriers have a lot of customers that are very much into the web 2.0 space and are friendly to these kind of things. This I think is the area to reach out to.

By leveraging the carrier network and it’s features (specifically broadsoft in this respect), you can then deliver (as they call it) “Carrier Grade” applications to the web 2.0 space. Is it easy to monetize social apps? Simply put, no not really. Is it possible? yes.

Additionally, understanding a carriers’ problems in relation to their customers needs will provide you with a honeypot of solutions that will sell.

Just my .02 as another developer in this space.

-JoeDeveloper

I can appreciate, and indeed would expect, that Broadsoft make no money from the developer program. Supporting developers is the price of entry for a platform player.

Except for specialized IT vendors, however, I am having trouble believing that developers are making serious money with even very clever mashups in the carrier space. Carriers are nearly universally rear-vision businesses, as we discovered to our surprise after spending two years marketing products that we had built to them.

But you know, I would be happy (nay ecstatic) to be proven wrong. Keep me posted!

Specific to my quote, what we saw was one carrier customer see an application done and posted on the Marketplace, understand its relevance to what they were offering their customers and come ask us and that developer how it works, would it hurt them to deploy that, would it need enhancing, etc…

Also, since our customer base does consist of non-carriers as well; they’re actually way more eager in the near term to use this, because it allows them to differentiate their phone service – “its not just a phone number you get from us, you also get the ability to integrate into your daily apps”. Some of these service providers are using their IT resources to integrate BroadSoft into a target vertical markets’ popular apps, and sell that as a value add-on to voice.

BroadSoft makes no money from the dev program nor the marketplace. We’d make money when our customers buy more user licenses and seats on the core BroadWorks platform, when they see more customers signing up because voice-as-a-web 2.0-service is possible over a BroadSoft-based VoIP offering.

Not easy, clearly. But necessary to initiate…and frankly we’d rather be giving our customers the tools now than later.