Exploring Telco Clouds With VoIP Drupal, Tropo & Twilio

Posted on: January 3, 2012 Comments: one comment Posted by: shidan

Every telecom related software and product that I have been involved with the last four years (and boy does time fly fast) has been on the device side and long gone are the days when I lived and breathed server side solutions. During the past holidays, I decided to take a peak back at the other side and see what’s new, especially with open source and Telco cloud services.

It turns out not much; you have a few new services like Twilio and a few of new “high level” middleware solutions. One of these that caught my eye was VoIP Drupal a project started by folks at MIT’s Media Labs and Center for Civic Media.

I decided to take it for a spin. In addition to Asterisk and Freeswitch, VoIP Drupal actually supports both Twilio and Tropo which was an added bonus for my exploration.

I must say, my overall sentiments on Telco clouds haven’t changed these years, telecom infrastructure as a service should no longer be about start-ups. You are dealing with a mature market and an overabundance of well developed technology platforms; the value adds that a start-up can provide are going to be small and easily reproducible. This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in the Telco cloud, to the contrary, telephony is really hard and anything that makes bringing voice communications to the web easier is valuable.

Playing with Twilio, my impression was that they have done a great job in creating an easy to use system, but with quite limited functionality. The service is also very easy to replicate.

Tropo, on the other hand, pleasantly surprised me … Voxeo is taking a different approach and moving beyond a platform for telephony (phone numbers) to a platform for true unified communications that supports a slew of networks including the PSTN (phone numbers in over 40 countries with SMS in US and Canada), Gtalk/Jabber, SIP, Twitter, AIM, Yahoo and MSN Messenger. Having one API that writes to all these services can be incredibly useful. Something else to note about Voxeo is they are not exactly a start-up; their voice platform is quite mature and feature rich.

Now going back to VoIP Drupal and why I think it’s brilliant. Well to start with, Drupal is brilliant:

• It has lowered the barrier of entry for webs start-ups more than any other framework to date.
• There are countless inexpensive and talented developers who can mold Drupal into virtually any web service you can think of.
• It has many existing solutions that can be easily customized to fit your needs.
• It has the confidence of enterprise companies and it’s being developed in a way to meet the needs of the future web.

VoIP Drupal is important because it empowers the millions of Drupal web developers to build virtually any telephony service you can think of, from a GroupMe clone to a Grasshopper type of service, without knowing much more than the standard Drupal abstractions … and it does this without tying you to any proprietary platforms and services. In fact, together with a solid backend, like Freeswitch, VoIP Drupal can serve the non-specialist as their own personal (and scalable) Twilio.

I‘m confident that providers who decide to ignore or compete with VoIP Drupal, instead of surfing its wave will get washed away sooner or later; VoIP Drupal will impact the decision of millions of developers when it comes to telephony integration and the best way for a cloud platform provider to stay relevant to non-specialist web developers will be to compliment and increase the its value (and any similar projects that might pop up). A good example of this type of value is Tropo’s ASR module which brings speech recognition to VoIP Drupal, a feature that is completely absent on Twilio BTW.

For the technically inclined, I’ve taken some notes that will make a good how-to for getting started with VoIP Drupal and Tropo, I will post it here in the next few days in case it might be of use.

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