Voice 2.0 services inch closer to reality

BroadSoft today took a key step forward in establishing its “voice 2.0” Xtended platform, announcing five service provider customers in deployment with the application development and mashup environment.

While none of the company’s large tier-one VoIP customers – Verizon, Telstra, KPN, SingTel or others – have taken the Xtended plunge quite yet (at least in terms of a formal announcement), the vendor did announce five service provider customers, mostly in the hosted business VoIP/IP PBX arena: Alteva, SimpleSignal, Telesphere, Unity, and WorldxChange Communications.

Those providers “have prototyped some applications and are in the process of productizing and rolling them out,” said Leslie Ferry, BroadSoft vice president of marketing.

Given that many of the early providers are in the enterprise business, BroadSoft isn’t likely to start competing with Apple in terms of application downloads anytime soon. But with VoIP installations at many large carriers around the world – and with more subscribers coming on board with its recent Genband and Sylantro VoIP platform acquisitions – the BroadSoft Xtended platform remains one of the “voice 2.0” platforms to watch.

The idea of such application mashup platforms debuted to great fanfare several years ago. And while progress has been made – including BT’s high-profile acquisition of voice platform company Ribbit – the concept has not taken off as hoped to this point. BroadSoft’s news today, however, could represent a shift in momentum.

Count Alteva as an enthusiastic advocate. The enterprise VoIP provider already had a keen focus on leading with applications rather than basic hosted IP PBX services. The Xtended platform gives it an application with a good combination of support for open Web standards while also supporting tight integration of those standards with the underlying softswitch feature set, said William Bumbernick, Alteva CEO.

“We’ve always been very application-centric, creating our own apps to talk to our own switches,” Bumbernick said. “But we always had to be careful because without the right restrictions and caution, you can create issues. With [BroadSoft’s platform] we have to worry less about that. In addition, our development model, which used to be entirely in-house for us, can now be customer-focused. The platform has a very simple [Web-based] front end that any Web developer can understand. It allows our customers not to rely on Alteva to create applications; they can create their own applications and integration points.”

In addition to using Xtended for custom enterprise development, Alteva will use the Xtended platform in a variety of additional ways. In February, it plans to roll out services built on Xtended that bring sophisticated calling features to standard SIP handsets. In March, it plans to launch an Adobe Air-based desktop application for managing calling features on its network. And it’s in the mock-up stages of creating an Alteva-branded application “marketplace” that will give customers access to all the third-party applications built on the BroadSoft Xtended platform, Bumbernick said.