Three emails are not "best efforts". 4.5 months notice is not "best effort".
My opinion on best effort: I founded, ran, and sold a SaaS company used by some of the most well known companies in the world. Our "best effort" was a minimum of 12 months notice, with a six month grace period afterwards. Emails weekly. Phone calls at least once a month. Reach out to customer leadership if no response. Then scream test as others suggested.
Thank you for the feedback and for pointing out the typo on the technology page.
We discussed the "language" issue extensively before this announcement. The fundamental challenge we faced was that this announcement - at this time - is not targeted at developers. The "gushing market-speak" and press release language were intended for a specific audience. Based on the companies who contacted us to learn more about Ameche yesterday, it appears we reached our specific target market as we desired.
We will have a more in-depth, technology and developer focused Ameche announcement and release at a later time.
You mentioned "In the past, I've [used] Voxeo IVR platforms..." and I wanted to comment on that.
Voxeo's IVR platform (Prophecy) is recognized by Gartner and Datamonitor as industry leading. Prophecy is used in the largest IVR deployments in the world (more than 50,000 ports for a single customer application) and the smallest (single-line micro-banking applications in Africa).
Voxeo is also extremely customer focused. We have a reputation for being so that is shown by our customer retention rate (over 99%) and customer satisfaction scores.
I and everyone else at Voxeo are extremely interested in improving Prophecy and our other products in any way possible. If you have any specific criticism of our platforms or our documentation I'd love to hear it. I'll pay you for your time to talk with us about the things you disliked. Please let me know if you'd be up for that. You can reply here or contact me via @visionik on Twitter.
I am the largest shareholder in Voxeo. I never went to college. I'm allergic to dust mites. I'm a habitual abuser of allergy medicines. I've listened to nothing but The White Stripes for three months and it's altered my DNA. I routinely squash the hopes and dreams of our youth by slaying them in Call of Duty. And I only own four hats.
Full Clojure:
visionik=> (apply str (interpose "." ["Voxeo Shareholder" "No College" "Dust Mites" "White Stripes" "Call of Duty" "Four Hats"]))
Thank you for asking. "Enterprise grade" can be a vague marketing term. This is what Voxeo means when we say PRISM is "enterprise grade":
1. Fault tolerant: Including the ability to do state-full failover of applications from one PRISM server instance to another.
2. Scalable: Proven ability to scale to over 25,000 calls per server.
3. High performance: Proven ability to scale to over 800 call setups (new calls) per second per server.
4. Standards-based: PRISM implements the Java SIP servlet standards (JSR-289) and Java Media Control standard (JSR-309). PRISM applications can run unmodified on similar platforms from Oracle, IBM, and Redhat - and vice versa.
5. Support: PRISM is backed by a company with guaranteed 24x7 support, under 20 minute response times, over 150 employees, world-wide offices, financial stability, and 10 years of experience.
On top of that, yes, PRISM is often used in the enterprise and by service providers. :)
PRISM is also used for everything we do at Voxeo. All of our products and services, including Tropo, are built on top of PRISM.
Hi - and thank you sincerely for the points you made.
I am writing this to provide context, not to disagree with you...
Relatively speaking, Voxeo was as cheap 10 years ago as Twilio and Tropo are today.
Everything about this business was more expensive 10 years ago though. The cost of bulk long distance was 8x higher, server costs were about 10x more, bandwidth cost about 10x, server hosting (nothing like EC2 existed) was about 3x more... all costs were much higher then they are today. However, Voxeo's pricing 10 years ago was much lower than every other option available. It was very disruptive.
We did market to reach people like you, that's why we have over 200,000 members in the Voxeo developer community today. And that community is growing faster than it ever has. We clearly didn't reach everyone though.
We have many customers with 100+ employees that started off as 2-3 guys and an idea 10 years ago. The developer focus worked and is the cornerstone of our business. It's how we became the largest platform in the world for telephony apps.
In short the service absolutely was for indie devs, 2-3 man shops and start ups. We had no idea how to sell to large enterprises and service providers back then. It wasn't our DNA. We are developers. I'm a developer. We built it for developers. It was entirely about developers ;)
We took a different approach though. We focused on making standards. We hate lock-in. We hate proprietary. That's why Tropo is an open-source platform. We hate the country-club mentality that you find from legacy vendors like Avaya and Alcatel.
So we lead both the W3C VoiceXML and CCXML standards. Along the way those standards got massive adoption in the enterprise and service provider markets, and the resulting large opportunities pulled us in that direction. We continued to focus on developers, just not at the 100% level we used to.
We created Voxeo Labs to have a new team that focuses 100% on developers. Not to try to "create" a developer focus, but to refine the focus we have always had. That effort is working out great. Like some of the posts here point out, we have our own rabid developers. And we're very quickly getting better at building the fanbase you mention.
Our biggest challenge when it comes to focused simplicity is what we know. We've lived through all the little features and gotchas that need to be addressed as developers scale from the small projects to the larger needs you mention.
When we built Tropo, we included things in it to address those needs and get past those gotchas. We couldn't help ourselves :) The problem is we're solving problems developers don't even know they'll have yet. The end result looks more complex... until it's exactly what you need.
To wrap up, I've never suggested it's just marketing/evangelism. It is also, as you point out, a focused simplicity. We've got some great improvements coming to improve our simplicity while we also continue to provide answers to the feature requirements and challenges we know developers will hit as they scale.
Btw I also hate the webapi vs scripting issue, and I let the Voxeo Labs team know that almost every week ;)
So what else can we do to improve our developer focus and bild that fanbase? How can we get better?
PRISM is a highly scalable, reliable, and extensible communications application server. It's a very proven platform and is used by several of the largest consumer and commercial VoIP providers. It's also used in Microsoft's Tellme service and is the foundation of all of Voxeo's products and services.
Asterisk can be painful, but they have a new ground-up project in very-early (pre-beta) stage called Asterisk SCF that is designed to achieve PRISM-like capabilities.
Woah there, your post is misleading and I want to make sure no one is confused as a result.
You said you inquired about Voxeo/Tropo but the pricing you mention above has absolutely nothing to do with Tropo.
Tropo is 100% free for development use - always.
Production Tropo pricing starts at 3 cents per minute with free second-leg (connected) calls, free voice recognition, free high-quality speech synthesis, free 24x7 support, no minimum, and no port limitations.
You make a great point, but it's also somewhat disingenuous ;)
It takes some time to learn how to use a platform.
It takes some time to code on a platform.
The actual writing of code is easiest when you are doing small applications. However, when you are writing larger applications the coding becomes the larger portion of time.
Today it's easier to learn Twilio than Tropo - largely because Tropo needs better documentation (that's coming very soon). However, I will contend that once you know the platform, Tropo is easier - and much more powerful.
I think that's what others are saying in this thread. We've also heard that from customers who have switched from Twilio to Tropo.
None of this should be surprising to anyone. Voxeo has been doing developer-centric telephony for ten years. Voxeo knows all the little problems and challenges that can come up over time and we've built a platform to address them.
Twilio is new to the industry, they came at things with a fresh set of eyes and were able to "re-factor" the simplicity and usability yet again with that fresh perspective.
I say "re-factor" because it's exactly what we did at Voxeo when we started in 1999. The experience reminds me of Battlestar Galactica: All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
Hi - Tropo should cost about the same as Twilio depending on your use case, but Tropo does alot more than Twilio for a roughly equivalent price. For example. Twilio just does SMS, Tropo does SMS and IM. Tropo adds speech recognition and higher quality speech synthesis, etc.
Also, I wanted to make sure I understand, what kind of specifics did you feel are lacking in Diggz post? We love to learn how to improve our product and our communication about it. If you are up for discussing it we will give you $100 on Amazon or Paypal for your time. Just email me at jtaylor at voxeo dot com.
That's a great summary. A good analogy is that Tropo is 30% harder to learn than Twilio... but it can do 300% more than Twilio.
We've got a big release coming that makes Tropo much easier to use. Entirely new documentation, sanded off some of the rough edges on features, added new ones to make some use cases simpler.
I'd love to hear about the specific road bumps that made it harder for you, it would really help us improve our simplicity. We will give you $100 on Amazon or Paypal for your time. If you're interested email jtaylor at voxeo dot com.
If Tropo can do anything to help you in China please let us know. Asia is a key market for Voxeo/Tropo. We have two data centers there (Singapore and Hong Kong), as well as an R&D, support, and sales team with about a dozen people in Beijing. Feel free to email me at jtaylor at voxeo dot com.
Thank you! We are working our actual and virtual asses of to make Tropo the best developer platform for all communications applications (not just voice and sms: also IM, Twitter, telephony-in-web-clients, etc). We are also working hard to get the word out!
International is hard. I know from experience. That's where Tropo has one clear advantage over Twilio. Tropo is built on the Voxeo network, which has ten years of international experience, is deployed world-wide (seven data centers), and integrates directly with most of the carriers around the world.
I believe Twilio integrates directly with a single carrier (Level3). Last I checked they use/resell bandwidth.com for most of their calls.
First - Danielle I have the utmost respect for you and the marketing momentum you've been able to build around Twilio. However, saying the "quote is completely fabricated" is itself is fabricated ;) It's not a quote - it's a reference to something you said at ITExpo west this year. Diggz wasn't there, but he (and I) were told by multiple people that you said it.
Voxeo is an extremely open and honest company. I mean extremely. I seriously doubt any single Voxeon would make this up, never-mind multiple Voxeons. It's personally important to me to resolve this because I feel the honor and honesty of Voxeo is being challenged when you say it's "completely fabricated". Are you claiming you said nothing at all like that?
Second, wether you now acknowledge saying it or not… to be frank, in my (and many other web-powered telephony industry vets) opinion it happens to be pretty darn true. Twilio has done a great job focusing on simplicity. Twilio is many great things - but Twilio is not innovative. I'm not trying to be a competitor or a jerk when I say that… I honestly have not seen a single technology innovation delivered by Twlio. If you disagree, please suggest a few and so I and others who have been doing this for ten years can openly and fairly respond.
I'll give you some examples of what I mean - compared to Voxeo. But I want to make it clear that this is not all about Voxeo. You could also make comparisons to TelMe, Bevocal, Telera, Motorola and several others who were around ten years ago. Voxeo is far from being the only company that invented and innovated the web telephony industry ten years ago:
1. Voxeo created and patented most of the technology and concepts Twilio uses today . in 2000, as shown here:
2. Like Voxeo, Twilio makes it easy for any web developer to create telephony applications, with a focus on lower cost and ease of use. Voxeo has done that for ten years, as shown from the archived Voxeo developer web site on August 19, 2000:
3. Their are slides in Twilio's 2008-2009 investor presentation which are nearly an exact duplicate of Voxeo's 1999-2000 investor presentation. To be clear, I don't know if Twilio's founders saw our presentation but the business plan concepts are so similar that slides were nearly exactly duplicated. Down to the words and diagrams used.
4. Twilio leveraged "super angels" to help build marketing momentum. Although the term didn't exist back then, Voxeo's angel investors in 2000 included Eric Schmidt (now CEO of Google), Dale Fuller (then CEO of Borland), and David Orfao (then CEO of Allaire) ... they helped us build significant marketing momentum.
5. This is the first Voxeo example app in our docs, circa 2000:
<callxml>
<text>Hello World</text>
</callxml>
This is the first Twilio example in your docs, ten years later:
<Response>
<Say>Hello Monkey</say>
</Response>
All marketing BS and propaganda aside: Voxeo and Tropo.com are just way ahead of Twilio when it comes to innovation and features. Everything Twilio has today Voxeo had ten years ago. And Voxeo/Tropo have many features Twilio doesn't: voice recognition, open SIP access, Skype integration, universal API for voice / SMS / IM / Twitter / etc, open source web client access (phono.com), direct Ruby/PHP/Phython/Groovy script language support (no need to force everything into XML and back to get things done)… there is no way Twilio could keep up match Voxeo / Tropo innovation and features, because Twilio is ten years behind from the get-go. And Voxeo is investing more in new innovation and features today than ever.
I and the rest of Voxeo have always tipped our hats to Twilio when it comes to your marketing, modern web developer outreach, refocusing on simplicity, pricing models, etc. Seriously, hats off.
However, the singular thing that bugs me (and other industry vets) about Twilio is how Twilio pretends they invented all these features and is a really innovative company. I thought your comments and "tip of the hat" to Voxeo and Tropo on innovative features at ITExpo west was the first time Twilio has publicly been a bit honest about this. I'm honestly disappointed to see you may be returning to Twilio the party line. I hope that's not the case.
Thanks for the summary of what Twilio makes possible.
What nivertech (who you responded to) knows and was trying to say is this:
With Voxeo (and others) a competent web developer has been able to create a telecom company in six weeks - or add voice features in less than a day - for ten years now. Voxeo delivered and has grown a completely free web-based telephony developer program since 2000.
And since 2000 over 200,000 developers have used Voxeo to do just that.
This is the Voxeo developer site in the wayback machine archive from August 19, 2000:
"our mission at voxeo community is to make it as easy as possible for web developers, service providers, and enterprises to create and deploy applications for an existing market of 1.5 billion telephone users.
existing web developers & services use technologies like Perl, PHP, Cold Fusion, Microsoft ASP and Java Servlets to create web applications for traditional web browsers via HTML. we make it just as easy to use those technologies to create web applications for telephones, using phone markup languages such as VoiceXML, Microsoft WTE, and CallXML."
Here's the juicy part:
"if you have experience creating web applications, this site will help you create and test your first phone application in less than an hour -- without any new hardware or software."
Sound familiar? :)
What Twilio has done that's new is use marketing and hype to convince developers they invented something that was invented by others and available for a decade now. The power of hype never ceases to amaze me.
To be fair, Twilio also did a great job creating more modern developer documentation and refocusing on simplicity. These are things Voxeo had drifted away from as we grew into "the man". In short, we got distracted by million dollar deals with enterprises and carriers. We've continued to invest in our developer community but things got increasingly complex as we added more and more features and options over time.
Our new Voxeo Labs group - and it's Tropo.com service - was created to fix that. We're behind on the evangelism but way ahead on the technology. And I dare say we're getting better at evangelism every week. ;)
My opinion on best effort: I founded, ran, and sold a SaaS company used by some of the most well known companies in the world. Our "best effort" was a minimum of 12 months notice, with a six month grace period afterwards. Emails weekly. Phone calls at least once a month. Reach out to customer leadership if no response. Then scream test as others suggested.