September 13, 2007

Voiceroute Demonstrates Druid ECS 4 at INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO West 2007

By Patrick Barnard

Voiceroute demonstrated the capabilities of its Asterisk-based VoIP platform at this week’s INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO West 2007, held in Los Angeles. The company claims its Druid Telephony Platform, designed for small to medium sized businesses, is the industry’s “first truly plug and play CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocal) based auto-provisioning of Cisco, Polycom and Linksys phones with additional VLAN based auto-provisioning of Aastra, Snom and GrandStream phones.

This flexible yet simple to administer open source software has been deployed in multiple DSP embedded Asterisk PBX appliances, including the Vdex 40 from Technoco, to rack servers and virtual machines. The platform was used during the 2007 Cricket World Cup in St Lucia to power more than 200 extensions and it was also demonstrated by Motorola as a MicroTCA application at the 2006 3GSM in Barcelona.

During the show, Voiceroute demonstrated its Druid Live Click-to-Call VoIP hosted service with Adobe Flash for enterprises. Ideal for online sales and customer support, the service offers interactive presence based and context sensitive Click-to-Call communications.

Ming Yong, Voiceroute CEO, explained that with its open code, “Enterprises can embed our interactive flash widgets into their flash video, rich media ads, text ads and web sites to allow interested customers to seamlessly connect using voice and text with a sales or customer support representative without installing any java soft-phone client on the customer side or server side software on the SME side."

He added that these widgets “are Web context sensitive and highly customizable, allowing SMEs to achieve brand recognition and gather valuable analytics of their web customers and sales/support personal interacting through the Click to reach services.”

Druid Live is currently in alpha trials. The beta version is expected to be released to the public in October.

Developers have free access to the Druid Live API via the Voiceroute Druid Live network. Interested parties should email: reach@voiceroute.net.

Voiceroute also announced that it is partnering with The Amanda Company Inc., a leading provider of voicemail/auto attendant unified messaging systems.

Specifically, The Amanda Company will use Voiceroute's Druid Telephony Platform to power its Amanda *Star Portal, a telecom interconnect friendly Asterisk-based IP-PBX solution for SMB's.

David Woo, managing director of The Amanda Company, said “using Asterisk as the basis for the Amanda *Star Portal gives SMB's access to the improvements and innovations of thousands of developers that continual modify and extend the software. The largest challenge was the development of a telecom friendly interface to administer the potential complexities of Asterisk,” he said. “We called on Voiceroute with their proven Druid interface and they answered by delivering a completely revamped release that implements many of the telecom oriented changes we requested.”

The Druid Telephony Platform includes full extension mobility with end user time based routing as well as point and click voicemail provisioning over any IP-phone in the network. It also includes plug and play support for Sangoma Cards.

Ming Yong, Voiceroute CEO, said, “our CDP and VLAN based auto-provisioning support for Cisco, Polycom, Linksys and Snom phones will enable our interconnect customers to truly experience open source Asterisk deployments the way it should always have been: on-site plug and play with great service with commodity hardware."

For additional details, visit www.voiceroute.net and www.taa.com.

Patrick Barnard is Associate Editor for Customer Interaction Solutions magazine and Assignment Editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page