Voxeo just picked up their second important acquisition of the year, acquiring VoiceObjects ““ the makers of tool sets for developing, deploying and managing telephone applications.
I’ve always been interested in trying out the VoiceObjects developer interface ““ it integrates with the Eclipse IDE ““ and I have now downloaded their developer package to give it a test drive. (Look for a future post on this topic.)
Earlier this year, Voxeo acquired a company called Micromethod — a developer of SIP-based communication and collaboration software ““ and it almost immediately showed up as a benefit to Voxeo users by the inclusion of important new features in the forthcoming Prophecy 9. This means that Voxeo users will probably soon see some very interesting and useful new features in Prophecy as a result of the VoiceObjects acquisition.
Here is a snippet from the announcement that I read with interest:
VoiceObjects uniquely enables the development of phone applications that can be deployed on a wide variety of VoiceXML platforms. This capability is in stark contrast to vendor-specific development solutions offered by Voxeo’s competitors. These single-vendor solutions restrict application deployment to a vendor’s own VoiceXML platform, denying the freedom of vendor independence and application portability the VoiceXML standard was designed to support. Voxeo will continue to openly and actively support VoiceObjects’ application deployment on multiple VoiceXML platforms including Aspect, Avaya, Genesys, Intervoice and Nortel. VoiceObjects will also be available in extremely cost-effective on-demand and on-premise offerings bundled with Voxeo’s own Prophecy VoiceXML Platform.
Application portability is a big issue for many developers (including myself), and its impressive that Voxeo has underscored their long standing commitment to this principle with their acquisition of VoiceObjects.
Overall, this is very exciting news , and I’m really looking forward to seeing the VoiceObjects tool set bundled with Prophecy (which, in my humble opinion, can now pretty much lay claim to the title of “Best Freakin’ Voice Platform on the Market”).