Voxeo has quietly built over the past 12 years an impressive enterprise voice and messaging business.  Their business began in hosted IVR (Interactive Voice Response) where they’ve achieved a leadership position as shown in the Ovum analysis below.  However, through their 250k strong developer community they’re really now a leader in communication enabled business processes.

Voxeo is profitable and management owned, which avoids all the headaches caused by trying to achieve “the exit” for investors within 5 years.  Instead it keeps them focused on their customers and partners.  As an example, they’re standards-based using VoiceXML and CCXML, which makes it easy for customers to switch them out, unlike their competitors.  Voxeo is run by engineers whose view is openness forces them to provide excellent customer service and give customers confidence in choosing Voxeo.

Customers include Comcast, TATA, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Swisscom, 1800Flights, Versatel, Proximus, TelWorks, governments, banks, healthcare, utilities,  etc.  Really any business that needs to communicate with customers.   Their communications platform is also behind innovative services such as:

• Ringio is a CRM friendly Virtual PBX that helps smaller companies improve the quality of their customer interactions.  With hosted PBX plugins for Salesforce.com, Zoho, SugarCRM and Batchbook.
• Opiniator provides real-time customer feedback from mobile phones.  Its a customer feedback technology, supplying real time, actionable, point of experience feedback, using the customer’s mobile phone. With analysis and alert management, a business knows how it is performing, can fix issues or recover a dissatisfied customer.
• SendShorty is a professional services firm with a cloud based text messaging service that makes creating mobile campaigns and sending targeted text messages to groups of people easy for businesseses.

Voxeo has built up over the years a global cloud to run its communications platform and a global community of over 250k developers using its open APIs that use web-centric standards.  This brings me to why Voxeo is one to watch from a telco perspective, not only has it achieved success in services operators should be providing to their customers.  Voxeo has created “Voxeo Labs” enabling operators to quickly and profitably deliver thousands of commercially available and proven network API-enabled enterprise communications services (third party, co-branded or operator branded). Fast-tracking an operator’s network API program to address the potential $120B+ per year in network API-enabled communication services.

Voxeo Labs uses the operators’ existing network assets, e.g. Parlay gateways or IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) or other SIP / NGIN platforms, to expose a rich and flexible set of real-time communication APIs to meet the diverse and rapidly evolving needs of real-world communication service developers.  While enabling operators to quickly define and deploy custom services to meet their customers’ specific needs. Voxeo Labs offers their solution in a range of configurations from software-as-a-service so operators can get going in under one month, to operator owned and managed.

Operator API initiatives that have focused on technology, that is the API, and embarrassing attempts at trying to create a developer community have failed.  An API is just a piece of technology to deliver a service which solves a business problem.  Voxeo Labs provides the community / ecosystem, the API-enabled services, and the web-centric real-time communication APIs to deliver immediate solutions to the business problems of an operator’s customers.  As well as enabling innovation both internally and externally to the operator, as we’ve seen with BlueVia‘s use of Voxeo Labs in ConnFu.