Ifbyphone Acquires Cloudvox, Enables Cloud Telephony App Development
According to Chicago-based Ifbyphone, the Cloudvox purchase adds to Ifbyphone's already available cloud-based applications, which end customers can rent, making Ifbyphone a cloud application developer platform for portable telephony applications.
Ifbyphone automates phone calls using IVR, video broadcasting, call tracking and virtual call center applications and technologies. The 2-1/2-year-old company also made available an API that lets customers integrate applications, but lacked a way for resellers and end users to develop and deploy their own applications to automate calls, using their own software and code they write and control.
"We've always had cloud-based infrastructure for telephony applications," Irv Shapiro, Ifbyphone's CEO, said. "But you couldn't build your own application into the cloud."
Seattle-based Cloudvox unlocks the ability to build applications based on Asterisk standards and point them to the cloud, he added.
"We're doing for telephony developers what Amazon [EC2] has done for Web developers," Shapiro said, adding that like EC2, Ifbyphone coupled with Cloudvox creates an open, portable cloud ecosystem that users can scale up, scale down and move as needed.
The acquisition also means developers won't be locked into Ifbyphone.
"We built a multitenant Asterisk environment that lets you write portable code that lets you move it wherever you want to move it," Shapiro said.
Shapiro said the Cloudvox acquisition positions Ifbyphone as the only cloud telephony provider that lets customers rent a phone-based application, integrate with an existing Ifbyphone app, or build a custom app.
Cloudvox bridges Web apps with phone services, enabling developers to place, receive and control phone calls from their own software.
"Cloudvox handles all of the telecom features, giving developers complete control of the phone call and their app," Troy Davis, Cloudvox co-founder, said in a statement.
"It's have it your way," Shapiro said. "If you want to rent prebuilt apps, we have them. If you want to build your own, we have that now too."