system toolbox » voip

http://www.scottburkett.com/index.php/technology/2008-10-01/its-official-starpound-has-launched.html

You can read a lot more about the platform over on the site, but I’ll serve up a quick description of it here, and share a little bit about where we’re going.

StarPound CORE is a beautiful fusion of business process management (BPM), telephony (VoIP/SIP, PSTN/TDM, cellular, etc.), and web services (SOA). What a mouthful. In other words, the platform gives you an easy way to turn your organization’s business processes into web (or voice) services. You can also use it to create any web service, not just those that are explicitly tied to some business process or telephony.

StarPound CORE is comprised of two key components: StarPound Studio and the StarPound Application Server. StarPound Studio is a visual process modeling tool that is BPMN compliant (very cool), and built on top of the Eclipse IDE. You create a visual model of what you want the voice/web service to do. You can drag/drop really cool things like calls to external web services (e.g. Salesforce.com, Google, etc.), call control tasks, IVR tasks, etc. Test it, then deploy it into the cloud on a StarPound App Server where it is ready to use. The service can be initiated by a person, a phone call, an email, FAX, SMS, or web application request via SOAP or REST.

The platform is 100% Java/J2EE, but obviously you can invoke deployed StarPound services using whatever language you are using (via SOAP or REST calls).

There is a lot more to our vision than what I’ve described, but at its core (no pun intended), that’s what the platform does. You can read more about our vision here.

What’s even cooler than finally releasing the first release candidate of the platform is that we’ve also released two sample open-source applications that were built on top of the platform (StarPound PBX and StarPound Call Center).

StarPound PBX is a full-featured, free, open-source PBX that gives you pretty much all of the features you’d need out of a PBX for your office:

• Auto-attendant
• Voicemail (and web-based voicemail)
• Call menus
• Call hold
• Call forwarding
• Call routing
• Conference calling
• Hunt groups
• Unified messaging
• User directory
• Integrated voice response
• Call center support
• Web-based administration
• Open-source and free!

And, it is scalable because it is built on top of the StarPound platform. Legally, I can’t mention any names, but one of the largest video game publishers in the world is now using StarPound PBX. And why not? It kicks ass.

StarPound for Call Centers is also mega-cool. It provides mission critical functionality for call centers, like skills-based routing, automated call distribution (ACD), inbound/outbound, predictive dialing, workflow management, queue management, CTI integration, call recording/monitoring, screen pops, agent dashboard, supervisor dashboard, remote agent support, etc. Again, free and open-source, and another really cool example of the types of apps you can build on top of StarPound CORE.

Right now we’ve got a ton of really exciting business and partnerships in the pipeline on the commercial side of things, and I’ll be writing some more about those things down the road as we work through them. But I can tell you that we are enjoying a tremendous push into the enterprise call center space, online marketplaces/exchanges, and scalable cloud services.

On a semi-related note, we’re also exploring opportunities to invest capital and resources in new startups that are in a position to take advantage of this new platform for creating disruptive applications within specific vertical markets. More on this soon … but you can read the official particulars here. We have a couple of deals that we’re already considering.

Now with all the cute cuddly launch comments out of the way, I’ll add this: We have a long list of incumbent industry players that we’re going after, in multiple markets and sectors. And we’re coming fast and going for your jugular. Let the games begin.

Hats off to the whole StarPound dev team for this launch (Wei, Andrew, and the guys in St. Pete) - it has been a long time in the making, and I know that everyone is ecstatic right now about where we’re going with the company. Good stuff …

Cheers.

opensource stack:

• linux
• eclipse
• mysql
• asterisk
• SER (sip proxy)
• JBoss

Asterisk is a telephony engine and toolkit. Meaning you can use it as the underpinning of lots of really cool telephony apps. You can use it as a PBX, a gateway, a media server, and even in call center contexts.

StarPound, while also an engine and toolkit, builds on top of toolkits like Asterisk. StarPound consists of a visual business process modeling tool, and a suite of application servers that allow you to automate those processes. For those processes that need to be “communication-enabled” (see: CEBP at Wikipedia), StarPound’s platform has telephony-related tools that tie into components at the Asterisk level.

StarPound relies upon external telephony engines like Asterisk to provide under-the-hood call control and media serving functionality. Note: We’ve done in-house integration and testing of FreeSwitch, and will be rolling out production support for that platform soon.

On top of all of these components, we have developed a suite of enterprise applications specifically aimed at call centers and enterprise PBX users. These applications are incredible on their own merit, but also serve as great examples of the types of applications that can be built with the StarPound platform. A lot of the confusion comes from people who equate StarPound as a “PBX in the cloud” company solely. They think “PBX in the cloud”, and then immediately think Asterisk.

Even though we have a cloud-based PBX application, we typically don’t host it for individual companies. That isn’t our model - that is the model of Vocalocity and others. We are the type of company that powers another company that wants to be in that space. We’ll have some big announcements to make soon on that …

So the short answer is, we are built on top of telephony toolkits like Asterisk and FreeSwitch, but that is really only a small portion of our overall capabilities. StarPound is more accurately described as a software platform that automates business processes by turning them into web and voice services. In fact, our PBX and call center applications are driven by, guess what? Business process models automated through StarPound! If you want to change something in your PBX or call center, you don’t fiddle with config files - you visually edit the “way” the application is supposed to work - the process model.