Voxeo is a provider of Unified Communications (News - Alert) and self-service platforms, a company that has been highly active in developing and acquiring customer self-service technologies.

 

Indeed, it has done quite a few acquisitions related to this area over the past few years, such as Micromethod (News - Alert) Technologies, a SIP provider, VoiceObjects – a tools provider for VoiceXML applications having expertise in video and SMS – and IMified, maker of a fascinating “IM bot” Chatterbot that can talk to and guide customers.

 

And now, Voxeo (News - Alert) has announced the launch of Voxeo Labs, an organization that will invest in core platform research, incubate exciting new ideas and innovate advanced communications solutions. Voxeo Labs products and services will be based on open standards and made available under community-centered open-source licenses.

 

Additionally, the leaders of Adhearsion, Jay Phillips and Jason Goecke, are joining Voxeo Labs full-time as founding staff. Adhearsion is an open-source, communications framework designed for maximum code reuse and intuitiveness. Adhearsion was founded by Jay Phillips in 2006 when he became frustrated while writing telephony applications on the well-known Asterisk (News - Alert) open-source telephony platform. Fascinated by the Ruby on Rails development environment, he devised a sophisticated application layer to run “over” Asterisk which ultimately led to Adhearsion.

 

Still powered by the Ruby programming language, Adhearsion is now perhaps the most popular open-source telephony application framework. Not so coincidentally, Voxeo is the primary sponsor of Adhearsion and will invest significantly to grow it along with its loyal developer community. Adhearsion will continue to run atop the Asterisk open-source PBX platform and plans to soon add support for Voxeo's Tropo cloud telephony service. (The Tropo platform enables developers to write telephony applications in PHP, Ruby, Javascript and Python.)

 

Over the next year, Voxeo Labs will launch several new open-source and open standards communications solutions.