Jaduka CEO Thomas Howe on Telephony, Open Source and Innovation
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Recognized as one of the most influential voices in the voice-over-IP (VoIP) arena, Thomas Howe is the CEO of Jaduka. The company's APIs incorporate common Internet building blocks, making it easy to integrate telephony services with any HTML-based application on any operating system. Jaduka's APIs facilitate many of the "voice mashups" appearing on the web--applications where voice services, data and applications create new services. Howe won VON Magazine's Innovator's Award for 2008. We asked him for a guest column here on OStatic, on the role open source is playing in telephony applications and voice mashups. Here it is:
Telephony, Open Source and Innovation
by Thomas Howe, CEO, Jaduka
Is it too much of a stretch to say that the telephone engineers were the first true geeks? Well it might be, but as my son is learning his first programming languages, he’s already figured out that the epicenter of computing in the sixties and seventies was in Murray Hill, New Jersey at Bell Labs. I nod and give him the phone geek gang symbol (the pinky and thumb in a fake handset), happy for my heritage.
None of us should forget that the Internet itself literally grew out of telecommunications companies, where the first and most important application for the nascent Internet was packet voice - way before it became a business for anybody. From C to transistors, from the Internet through the modem and all of it’s descendants, to today’s iPhone ecosystem, the communications field has been front and center in powering innovation that touches every vertical, and every market.
Starting late in the 90’s, the rise of high-speed networks and the open source movement marked a sea-change in communications. The most important and obvious open source example to come from that era was Asterisk, the open source PBX. Not only has it been a complete success in terms of deployment numbers, but it finally proved to all that open source solutions can be reliable enough to handle demanding applications like packet voice. (And the joke’s on those that held that low opinion of open source, as the day is coming where the most reliable option will be open source because of massive testing and eyeballs.) Asterisk was not only a low cost and reliable option, it was a true catalyst for innovation. All of those telephony applications that couldn’t get millions in funding might become alive with Asterisk’s help. Since then, impressive efforts like Adhearsion have taken the telephony innovation crown, again on open source. Even though voice innovation has thrived because of open source solutions, is this the way of the future?
I predict that open source software in the communications field will be important to those who create hardware and platforms, but probably not for those that write the applications. Telephony suffers from the “not that many ways to skin a cat” phenomenon. There are only so many voice-centric applications; I think there are about a dozen, maybe two. If there’s anything in the future voice innovation world, it will surely come from using voice to extend non-voice applications.
For instance, a homeland security application might be more compelling with a voice password to identify human beings, but the basic application is security - not voice. In cases like this, where there are tens of thousands of them, the important aspect of technology is in integration, not in the handling of voice itself. It is sufficient for the designer of the application to be able to trigger a call to a phone to collect a pass-phrase and completely unnecessary for them to worry about protocols, codecs and DTMF talk off rates.
What will replace the role of open source solutions like Asterisk and Adhearsion? I believe that web-as-platform approaches that use web services to access data and functionality will be the primary way developers solve problems like this. Sure, open source will surely power the infrastructures that supply web services, but a slow migration of open source away from voice application developers will probably happen. Instead of hundreds of thousands of Asterisk implementations, you will see only a hundred or so service providers making their resources available to the hundreds of thousands of application developers. That is a future architecture we're evolving at Jaduka with several types of voice services -- voice notification, one-click calling, voice diary and conferencing -- services that can be easily integrated within business processes, optimize workflows and enhance productivity.
Why is this going to happen in telephony? For the same reasons that it happens in many other fields: the support of software and applications is non-trivial. In particular, connecting to the still dominant legacy phone system is still tricky, arcane and expensive. Asterisk might be simple and free, but it hasn’t made voice quality debugging or arranging for international termination is easy. It simply can’t, as many of these fundamental problems are rooted in legacy and regulations. It is much faster, cost effective and reliable to have experts managing the telephony infrastructure in the cloud, providing what is probably an insurmountable advantage over deployments that rely on anything that lives behind a firewall.
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