May 8, 2008
Voice-as-a-Service Takes Shape
I’ve been telling people that the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) movement will not only transform the software industry, but also dramatically impact the telecommunications and networking businesses as well. A recent company announcement which received limited press attention is another indication of the trend I see emerging.
Ribbit – calling itself “Silicon Valley’s first phone company” – announced earlier this week the general availability of Ribbit for Salesforce, the first enterprise application to link mobile voice communications and SaaS business workflow to allow users to configure their own communications services.
Ribbit’s new offering is being characterized as a ‘voice automation’ solution which accelerates the deployment of communications and integrates them with customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities via salesforce.com.
This solution promises to eliminate the complexities of communications deployment and management projects, and improve worker productivity by tying their communications devices into their CRM systems.
Ribbit for Salesforce is built on the salesforce.com’s Force.com Platform and was tested in a private beta program involving more than 70 businesses. It is now available to all U.S. customers of salesforce.com via the salesforce.com AppExchange.
It also creates new competitive challenges for traditional telephony vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel and Siemens. It also creates new business challenges for traditional telecom resellers, as well as telecommunications carriers.
The self-provisioning capabilities and simplicity of administration offered by Ribbit’s solution, undercuts the value of traditional reseller and carrier’ consulting, integration and management services surrounding complex telephony equipment and services.
In case you think Ribbit’s solution will only appeal to a small circle of Silicon Valley tech-heads, be aware that the company has a community of over 4,000 independent developers building applications on Ribbit’s carrier-grade telephony-plus-software infrastructure platform. And, salesforce.com’s CRM and AppExchange solutions are rapidly being adopted by organizations of all sizes across nearly every industry.
Subscribe to my feed
Maybe this was the vision that eBay had when they splashed out USD4.1Bn on Skype. However despite their vast resources they don’t seem to have found a way to make Skype profitable.
I think a lot of the challenges with selling this end up with the capability of the overage business/user to take on board changes to what they consider to be pretty simple already. After all isn’t voice already an example of a service? Most of us don’t have an telephone exchange in the office/home, we have no idea where the wires go once they leave the house/office, we pay on a monthly basis and all this complex technology just works, connecing us anywhere in the world.
The arguement used to be price i.e Skype is cheap/free, however telco charges from the major players are tumbling (I pay GBP20 per month for an eat as much as you can, anywhere in the world – almost – telephone service, which also includes 8Meg broadband)
If the arguement now is greater capabilities, sophistication and integration then this is a great vision, that will appeal to the early adopters but misses the fact that the majority of businesses are v small and until it becomes simple to the point of “just plug it in” and the users can start using the new features without an advanced course in IT then it will stay as a really clever idea with limited penetration.
Stephen Parker — May 8, 2008 @ 9:33 am
Voice as provided by Telco’s has been a service for as long as Telco’s have been providing it.
In a very real sense, Telco’s were the first SaaS providers (but people don’t like to hear that).
This is cool, very cool and i agree that the incumbents have a lot to learn from 2.0 companies. But lets not get ahead of ourselves… this is evolution not reveolution
Unreasonablemen — May 8, 2008 @ 5:35 pm