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 NEWSThe CTO of Voxeo, Jonathan Taylor, talks about the merging of the Internet and telephony applications By Michael Vizard October 27, 2000 1:01 pm PT Jonathan Taylor believes that telephony app development can be as easy as using Web-based tools
 In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Taylor describes how Internet technologies can be used to significantly expand the base of developers that will help turn the Internet into a platform for telephony applications. I started a company in 1995, called IRDG, that created the first Internet unified messaging solution. That was an interesting experience for us because we were really Internet people. We had been guys that had used the Internet for a long time, and we were used to that way of doing things. So dealing with the telephone, the telephone companies, the terminology, the complexity, and the lead times just absolutely blew us away. It was a very painful lesson. We sold that company to Media Gate in 1997, and I was the CTO at Media Gate for two years. InfoWorld: What makes the development of telecommunications applications so complex? Taylor: There are all these arcane APIs, and there have been 10 years of standards battles with no winners. It's like the Middle East of APIs, and it's not getting better. InfoWorld: What impact has that had on the development of applications? Taylor: In my estimation, there are really only a few thousand qualified computer telephony developers in the U.S.; so, not only are these APIs arcane, it's not something that you can learn easily, and there are not that many qualified people available. What we do is take everything about the telephone and wrap it in Web technology so that normal Web developers can drive the telephone infrastructure. InfoWorld: Why did you also build a service to support your toolset? Taylor: If you could imagine if everyone that wanted to put up a Web site had to still get their own T1 line, router, or Web server, there'd be dramatically fewer Web sites and services. So we have a predeployed infrastructure that has the technology to connect from the phone side to the Web side so that our customers don't have to buy and deploy and manage all that stuff. Access to that infrastructure for development and creation and testing of applications is absolutely free. You can go to our Web site, create an account, get phone numbers, hook them up to URLs where your applications are, and go. We have over 500 developers today in our community program who are doing just that. InfoWorld: How does this work? Taylor: Basically we turn the telephone infrastructure into something that works like a Web browser. Let's say you're a Java Server Pages developer. Normally you would write a Java Server Pages application [that] would tie into databases and output HTML for the presentation for your Web browser. All you do with our infrastructure is take all of that exact same work. You output phone markup languages, things like Call XML, Voice XML, etc., which are requested by our type of browser. It takes that presentation and uses it to play audio on the phone call, react to it when they press digits, read text as text-to-speech, record audio and send it to an FTP, or e-mail it somewhere. It literally works with that model where you have logic running on Web servers and presentation on a browser. What we've done is make this kind of browser technology available in a predeployed infrastructure that is tied to the phone network. InfoWorld: What differentiates your approach in this space compared to other types of service providers? Taylor: We're not trying to build brand. We're very much an infrastructure provider that enables service providers, businesses, and ASPs [application service providers] to do their thing. InfoWorld: What impact will the Web have on people who build telephony applications? Taylor: Over the course of the next few years practically all new phone application development will be built the same way you build Web stuff. It makes sense. Instead of making two investments, you put all your investment in building one set of experience, one set of technologies, one platform. InfoWorld: How will these applications and services be integrated with existing applications in this space? Taylor: In the first stage, we're not interested in integrating with traditional PBXes. But the thing that will eventually connect the two is a new technology that happens in a different layer in our world. Voice-over-IP technologies are really not just a way to do things over long distance cheaply. They're the best way to integrate things. The thing that will solve this issue is voice over IP used as an interface. More and more of those products from companies like Lucent and Nortel and others have voice-over-IP capabilities today, and that will let us integrate into those products. InfoWorld: How do you know that this service you are building will scale to meet customer requirements? Taylor: This is one of the things that comes from going through all this stuff for six years. It's not so much that we're a bunch of philosophically bright guys, as we've already made all the mistakes. What does it take to do all this stuff? Well on the surface, you talk about the geek stuff, like the bits and bytes, but when it gets down to it, a large part of being able to build and scale an infrastructure like this has to do with understanding tariffs. A huge part of the phone industry in terms of how quick they can do things and what features they can have are based around tariff structures that are put in place. Understanding how to work tariffs to get the features in the time frame that you want it or the ability to work with local phone companies or CLECs [competitive local exchange carriers] to get new tariffs in place is a large part of the business. It's those kind of things that you don't go down to the bookstore and get a book on. Understanding telephony tariffs only comes from having done it. InfoWorld: So if you could change one thing about the industry, what would it be? Taylor: I would definitely try to push the adoption of IPv6, not so much for the ability to add 14 billion new computers onto the Internet but for some of the quality-of-service benefits that it brings. One of the challenges of doing any of these real-time solutions -- whether it's voice, going real time over the Internet, or video, or customer data -- is the underlying quality of service. And rather than every company that wants to connect something up in the space having to build or learn that rocket science, getting the quality-of-service parts on the next IP standard is something that I think is going to be key.
 RELATED SUBJECTS  TelephonyWeb TechnologiesSPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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