There’s been a lot of coverage of Ribbit, self-proclaimed “Silicon Valley’s first phone company,” which came out of stealth mode this week (for more background, read a bit here: TechCrunch; GigaOm).
In short, Ribbit — ridiculous name and questionable tag-line aside — has tremendous potential to be the startup that drops into the voice 2.0 application market and shakes things up a bit. Whether it “wins” (by building a solid business) or is acquired or scares larger players into copying its model is irrelevant. It’s done enough right that it its launch feels like a tipping point event on the path toward next-generation telephony services.
Technically, Ribbit has developed a carrier grade softswitch, integrated it into a nice telco-style stack of APIs to OSS, billing and other back-office services and made the whole thing accessible on the front-end via Flash. Yet another layer in the stack “normalizes” different (mainly Web-centric) communications protocols including XMPP, Skype, Flash Media Server and various IM clients, with a standard SIP stack handling the voice side of things.
But Ribbit’s value equation and point of differentiation starts and ends with its appeal to developers (the company claims it had 600-plus developers at a developer meeting last week).
By providing developers (Web developers, telephony developers) easy access to call control and service APIs, it hopes to unleash a wide variety of voice-enabled applications (see here for our debate on voice-as-a-feature versus voice-as-an-application). It will develop some of those services/applications itself, but it is really counting on a growing a developer community that will take its offering and run with it.
It’s an interesting model, and an inevitable one. Some new companies have played around with such an approach (from VoIP providers like Oomah or Jaxtr to vendors like BlueNote and LignUp to Asterisk-driven open source projects to telco efforts, most notably BT Web 21C). But few have made such a textbook play of it as Ribbit or come out of the box with such hype.
Let’s go deeper:
How Ribbit Works And What They Really Want
To handle the telephony call control and routing side of the equation, Ribbit built — and is hosting — a SIP softswitch (which the company claims it even put through some switch testing with Lucent). The switch is located in Northern Virginia and hosted at managed hosting provider Opsource (which even has a small case study on the set-up), with VoIP peering handled by IntelePeer.
Those capabilities are skin in the telephony game. The software in their set-up — handling typical BSS/OSS functions, including managing billing for their developers — is interesting in that they expose it too to developers. Banking on Flash and Flex scripting as the basis for application logic provides an easy developer entry point while ensuring integration with more developer-class IT tools like Eclipse, while avoiding telco-style development languages and APIs altogether (you can read the Ribbit call control API docs here; see the screen shot below for an example). The Flash-based demo phones Ribbit is showing on its Web site (see the screen shot at top) and talk of consumer services at best represent a reference application and at worst are a distraction to its core business.
Ribbit’s real target — which in an interview co-founder Crick Waters (who helped manage AT&T’s VoIP business, by the way) called “the big fat middle of the curve” — is to make it easy for companies running software-as-a-service applications to integrate voice into their workflow. Their first deal is with Salesforce.com, a good place to start, and Waters demoed a variety of voice functionality integrated into the Salesforce.com interface. The key, said Waters, is treating voice “as a first class data object” within the programming environment, enabling voice calls to be launched, voice messages to be appended to customer profiles and much more — all from within standard CRM business processes.
If Ribbit can effectively serve customers in that way and make their Salesforce.com deal work, they can then perhaps spin that success story up into a few more SaaS (software as a service) deals. Then they may have something.
The key, however, is that in the end Ribbit is NOT the be-all-end-all of “voice 2.0″ companies — despite a flashy (no pun intended launch) launch and the over-stated claim to be ‘Silicon Valley’s Phone Company.’
Rather, Ribbit represents one of the first high-profile, venture-backed startups to get into the voice application platform business — a business that service providers are aiming to get into themselves via service delivery platform (SDP) deployments. The opportunity is that Ribbit, and a handful of others, can build real businesses by targeting real markets (small business CRM, for example) that would benefit from Web/voice-integrated apps.
That is if Microsoft (with Microsoft Office Communications Server) and Google (with its Grand Central acquisition and Google Apps strategy) and all the world’s service providers don’t catch up to them first.
“We’re not displacing the functioning telephony system [a business] may have,” CEO Ted Griggs told me. “We want to take voice communications and integrate it into the [application] workflow on which they run their business. It’s a tremendous opportunity.”
