Real deal: BT acquires Ribbit

As rumored, BT has acquired alternative phone platform Ribbit Corp. for $105 million, saying it will help the service provider speed development of its 21CN platform by tapping the expertise and innovation of Ribbit’s Silicon Valley home.

Launched less than a year ago, Ribbit centers around a Flash-based development platform and call termination network that lets developers easily add voice and automation features to their applications. To handle the telephony call control and routing side of the equation, Ribbit built — and is hosting — a SIP softswitch (which the company claims it even put through some switch testing with Lucent). The switch is located in Northern Virginia and hosted at managed hosting provider Opsource (which even has a small case study on the set-up), with VoIP peering handled by IntelePeer.

Ribbit built its own consumer-oriented Web calling application, dubbed Amphibian, and delivered a service integrating voice service into Salesforce.com. Ribbit claims more than 4000 developers are working on its platform.

Access to those developers and the ability for any HTML or Flash developer to use Ribbit to rapidly build communications-enabled applications was likely the key to the deal, said Thomas Howe, independent developer and analyst and one of the few real experts on telco 2.0-style development.

“What happens when you have a tool that any web developer can use, like Flex or Flash?” Howe wrote on his blog today.”You’ve got a fair sight more than the hundred or so CEBP [communications-enabled business process] engineers that exist now. By acquiring Ribbit, BT acknowledges that there’s a severe go-to-market issue with CEBP deployments: there aren’t enough engineers to do them.”