Update: Listen to a podcast interview with Jaxtr’s Taneli Otala.
The post title here poses a question and the answer is probably obvious — IP-based voice communications today is all about software.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jaxtr — which today announced it has grown ten-fold from half a million to 5 million active users of its call-back voice over IP service in just over five months — has hired Taneli Otala, the former chief technology officer of open source database provider MySQL, as VP of engineering to help it expand its “network.”
I put network in quotes because what Jaxtr and its rivals offer is certainly a step removed from traditional telco networks and even P2P networks like Skype. In a nutshell, Jaxtr buys up a bunch of local phone numbers to fuel a call-back service that combines local PSTN-driven calling with the shuttling of the long-distance legs of those connections over the Internet. That combination makes most sense for international dialing, where per-minute prices are still high — and explains why almost 85% of Jaxtr’s users are from outside the U.S.
Jaxtr offers some bells and whistles — like Web-embeddable call widgets and advanced call handling — but really it’s the numbers game (price) which is driving its numbers growth (users).
We’re hoping to talk with MySQL’s Otala once he settles in. For now, Otala gave a statement describing the challenge he faces at Jaxtr:
Whether it takes Jaxtr another 140 days or a year to grow its membership yet again 10-fold to 50 million, we are designing a unique system that can handle such unprecedented growth.
Jaxtr runs its VoIP service on a cluster of Linux servers running MySQL and has been scouring the Web for MySQL admins, with Otala noting as he comes in the door: “We are hiring on all fronts.”
We talked with Jaxtr CEO (and LinkedIn co-founder) Konstantin Guericke about the addition of Otala. “[Jaxtr] is more of a Web company than anything else,” he said. “We use existing pipes to route traffic; voice traffic doesn’t hit our server at all, we just manage the signaling.”
Guericke noted that a system like Jaxtr’s really brings together the Web and telecom worlds in a whole new way. “It’s a very interesting time in telecom,” he added.
