Several companies, both Voice Mobility and LignUp, have been discussing and showing web services approaches to telephony applications here at Connect 2006. Enterprises are moving to service oriented architectures. Web 2.0 is all about mashups. Now we're seeing business telephony made available as a Web service.
The first demo in both cases is a telephony mashup with Google personal home pages, for example displaying voice messages and faxes on a Google homepage. Kevin Nethercott, founder, President and COO of LignUp showed multiple mashups and their respective implementation times:
- Adding telephony as a Google sidebar — 24 hours
- Integrating telephony with Salesforce.com — 48 hours
but
- Integration with Microsoft Outlook — 30 days
Mashups are rapid solutions.
I was particularly attracted by the Salesforce.com integration as our sale team uses Salesforce.com. A significant problem with any sales force automation system is getting field sales folks to actually input data. The LignUp Salesforce.com/Telephony mashup appeared to handle everything you'd expect, for example, calling customers, capturing telephony information and filling in Salesforce.com forms for both incoming and outgoing calls.
I haven't done a detailed evaluation, but the examples were striking considering this mashup was put together in 2 days.
One such telephony web service is the Angel.com Outbound API ( http://www.angel.com/solutions/outbound-ivr.jsp ) . It allows web developers to place automatic, interactive phone calls from their applications without having to worry about telephony, phone lines or IVR servers.
Posted by: Sam Aparicio | October 04, 2006 at 10:44 PM
Interesting. My company is involved in this field. Take a look at my VON Europe 2006 industry perspective here:
http://www.lucafiligheddu.com/Filigheddu%20-%20Industry%20Perspective.ppt
p.s. thanks for having left a comment to my blog... I had lost your blog address ;-)
Posted by: luca | November 01, 2006 at 04:40 PM