Continuing the the series of weblogs highlighting businesses running on Telecom APIs, we review BLI Messaging, BeQuick Software and Meet.fm’s experiences of running on Telecom APIs. They are all customers of Aculab, a provider of Telecom APIs like Tropo, Twilio, Plivo, APIdaze and Bandwidth.com recently reviewed in this weblog.
Aculab provides telephony resources on cloud, software and hardware-based platforms. With over 30 years of experience, their technology delivers multi-modal voice, data and fax solutions for use within IP, PSTN and mobile networks. I think of them as a Dialogic that has successfully transformed their business model from line cards to services by building out a global communications cloud like Voxeo corporation did with Tropo.
BLI Messaging migrated their voice broadcasting services for K-12 school districts onto Aculab’s Cloud telephony platform in November 2011 handling millions of minutes a month. BLI Messaging used Aculab’s line cards for a number of years. However, card based systems are limited on the number of concurrent calls. In addition, there’s the cost of managing and integrating the cards, 3rd party software integration layers and its application. This is a similar situation that delivery.com faced as well.
“Our previous internal systems were limited in capacity, but with Aculab Cloud we are able to consistently handle a much higher workload from our clients“, commented Andrew Maillet, Development Manager, at BLI Messaging. Malliet continued, “The Aculab Cloud service provided my company with the ability to quickly develop and deploy a stable and scalable voice broadcasting system“.
BeQuick Software delivers a hosted BSS/OSS solution called QuickTel. BeQuick designed and developed the software for prepaid, postpaid and VoIP service providers. BeQuick owns and manages the infrastructure required to deliver real-time order management, electronic provisioning, convergent billing, CRM, EBPP, customer and agent web portals, customized reporting, MVNO’s, trouble ticketing and workflow, IVR, SMS, and equipment inventory.
BeQuick needed to move away from its existing cloud-based IVR provider. It considered buying software to install in its data center, however,decided that a Communications Cloud service provider would present the best option. The BeQuick team were able to develop telephony applications with Aculab Cloud’s high-level Python programming language.
Meet.fm is a cloud service that combines online file sharing, web meetings and audio conferencing to help customers accomplish more in less time for less money. Their ‘all-in-in-one suite solution’ helps customers manage events and home projects. The online meeting feature, offered as part of its collaboration suite, plays a leading role for Meet.fm. Its main objective is to make it quick and easy for customers to set up on-demand meetings of any size.
Meet.fm’s success meant they needed to move to a cloud telephony and media platform provider that could meet all its requirements to handle conference rooms consisting of 100s of delegates, on-demand and has feature rich call management capabilities – playing prompts, DTMF detection, call recording, mute, and PIN codes. The international PSTN integration was also a reason Meet.fm chose Aculab. This is similar to Crunched case study, who were recently bought by ClearSlide.
These are great examples of what telecom application developers care about: scalability, total cost of ownership, reliability, trust, easy development, and features that support their business objectives. They are diverse businesses embedding communications into what people do everyday. I remain shocked that telcos continue to chase where they’re not wanted at hackathons, rather than focusing on helping their customers build their businesses: BLI Messaging, BeQuick Software and Meet.fm are all business customers of Telcos. This is a theme we’re going to address at the Telecom Application Developer Summit in the go-to-market panel session.