Enterprise Voice Mashups

Enterprise Voice Mashups  Money and Business Case Faster, cheaper and happier   Would you like some Paprika soup? Or, why we have it backwards.   So, exactly what is a mashup? A Vist from the Jargon Police   Architectures and Solutions What does it really look like?   Real World Examples My favorite health care examples 

Money and Business Case  My story… My name is Thomas, and I’ve been a telephony  developer for 18 years.  Nearly always, new telephony service offerings fail in the marketplace Customer education - don’t know it exists  Customer habituation - won’t change my habits  Expensive to deploy  Vanilla services == commoditization   There’s little to no integration between the PBX and the business process Walled garden vendors make it hard  Our own view points make it hard 

Let’s do a thought experiment What happens when you could, at no real cost, blend in real time communications with the business process.

Faster  What happens if you integrate real time communications in the enterprise?  Businesses run faster Find the right person  Eliminate delays in process  Push process outside the firewall   Real Example Remote worker automation…  How many forms do remote workers fill in?  Instant, on demand scheduling  What’s the universal interface? The phone   The business case is intensely unique to the business

Cheaper  What happens if you integrate real time communications in the enterprise?  Businesses are less expensive to run Eliminates wasted effort  Eliminates on-demand automated work  Increases location independence   Real Example United Parcel Service…  When you need a signature, they make a call  When you miss a delivery, you can reschedule  When they need to reroute in an emergency…   The business case is intensely unique to the business

Happier  What happens if you integrate real time communications in the enterprise?  Customers are happier Customers like control  Customers like visibility  Customers hate to learn   Real Example I’m flying JetBlue today…  My flight is cancelled - send me a text with options  When I call back, know who I am and tell me what I  need to know. The customer needs no education whatsoever.   The business case is intensely unique to the business

Would you like some Paprika Soup?  We are a bunch of voice engineers, writing voice applications, sitting in a voice show learning about … voice  Voice is obviously important to you… I even married a speech pathologist.   What if voice isn’t the most important thing to your customers? Guess what… I’ll take the bet that it’s not.   My contention: voice is not the meat, it’s a spice.  Due to natural evolutions in technology and markets, voice became an end unto itself, and that’s a mistake.

To the man with the hammer…  Every problem looks like a nail  To date, we only owned hammers. Walled gardens of technology  Vertical integrations by vendors and providers  Huge learning curves keep others out   Other tools have now arrived Comparatively, PBXs are now free  Comparatively, service providers are no longer  capital intensive Comparatively, the walls are down not only  with telephones, but with the network

What happened? Why now?  We have a radical lowering of barriers to entry to telecom development The investments made in 1997-2007 in telecom and  web technologies The growth of Web 2.0 culture   Smaller business cases become supportable Because it’s so inexpensive to deploy them   The Long Tail hits telephony As it hit shopping, music, television, etc.   Radical changes in strategy required Small is the new big  Large vendors must strive to be platforms  VAR is no longer a joke. It’s real.   The advantage is now closeness to customer.

The Simplest Example  Would you like to work at Dunkin Donuts?  Call them up They have an automated pre-screen line  Designed by an industrial psychologist  If you can sit at a phone for 30 minutes and take the  quiz… it’s a good sign  Business case? High turnover == high overhead  Ten cents a minute < Manager hourly wage  Higher Quality Hires : DD tracks success   Faster, cheaper, happier Faster : more interviews, better hires  Cheaper : Less turnover, less manager involvement  Happier : Interviewees get nearly instant feedback 

The Numbers Total Mashups : 2312  Total APIs : 511  Mashups Written / Day : 3.5  Last M&A : WeatherBank, Weather.com  Major APIs:  GoogleMaps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube,  VirtualEarth, YahooMaps, eBay, 411Sync, del.ico.us, Yahoo

Exactly what is a mashup?  Mashups are applications that: Use Web Integration Technologies  Use more than one data or service providers  Serve a niche audience   Mashups are a “light weight” model  Mashups depend upon open standards But even more so, open conventions   They aren’t silver bullets. Hard to see VoiceMail written as a mashup  But I sure could see VoiceMail as part of one 

Web Integration Technologies  By convention, mashups use Web Integration Technologies  Scripting Front Ends VoiceXML, JavaScript, AJAX, HTML   Web Platforms Ruby on Rails, Python, Perl   Web Services Component Integration SOAP, REST for service invocation  XML and JSON for data representation   Conventions Mashup developers use common tools, approaches,  languages… clothing. Nothing is good all the time, including flexibility 

Independent Data Sources  Mashups tend to use content from more than one source In fact, that’s where the name comes from   Classic Mashups Chicago Crime Map, slut-o-meter, wheel of lunch   Many successful examples Expedia, Hotwire, Amazon   Sharing comes from many angles Functionality, data source, hosting, termination   Telephony examples? Use YellowBook to get physical address from inbound  phone number to shop Amazon from phone. Use a Where applet to drive Google maps display for  dispatcher

Niche Solutions  Mashups have an audience, always The developer knows the audience   Very targeted, very personal Mashup developers tend to be individuals or very small  groups Solves small problems  Of which there are millions. More than that.   Interestingly, technically mashup architectures are insanely scalable Much more scalable than any other available  More reliable as well  My gut tells me cheaper, too - no evidence yet 

The Numbers Developer Team Size : 1-3  Development Time Large : > 1 month  Development Time Small : 1 day  Costs of Web APIs : Free  Costs of Telephony APIs : 2-50 cents  Costs of Tools : Free 

Architectures and Solutions  Two Predominant Mashup Architectures  Web Integrated Telephony Architecture Three component Architectures  Where Web 2.0 meets Telephony   Asterisk / Adhearsion Asterisk based architecture  Where Enterprise 2.0 meets Telephony 

Real World Examples  Some real world examples Focus on health care, could be any vertical  All examples are common to providers  Yet need customization   Congestive Heart Failure If you can catch the weight gain…   Morisky Surveys Four questions that predict the future   After Hours Dr’s Office Use any web service, including people   Pharmaceutical Patient Diary Quality of data == Quality of study 

For more information…  The Blogosphere Thomashowe.com  Hinchcliff  O’Reilly Radar   The Web Programmableweb.com  Mashable.com   The geeks Mashups are as much about society as technology  Mashup Camps   Your business Where can you use spice?  Faster - cheaper - happier 

Enterprise Voice Mashups

by howethomas on Sep 12, 2007

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Enterprise Voice Mashups — Presentation Transcript