Ribbit thing but a licensed platform approach

I very much fancy the Ribbit idea. Their focus on bringing together Voice 2.0 developers and effectively offering an aggregated new telephony platform sounds exciting. The Flash APIs for developers jazz up the offering a bit more. Ribbit however goes direct to the consumer. And that is probably more practical because telcos are horrendously complacent when it comes to deploying new applications.

I have not come across a vendor that aggregates Voice 2.0 applications and offer an integrated platform that can be licensed out to telcos. There are companies that offer their Voice 2.0 application both to consumers as well as license them out to an operator. However the aggregated platform in the latter category cannot be found so far. Most vendors think that having an underlying Class 5 type feature server (and may be some call control element as well) is a pre-requisite for offering such an aggregated platform. I have to disagree with that.

Let the operators keep their existing call control plane and stack the aggregated-Voice2.0 feature server by the existing Class 5 feature server. (By the way, there is a possibility of another breed of network elements … a piece of software that facilitates the development of mash-ups across the Class 5 feature set and the aggregated-Voice2.0 feature server; some kind of a ‘mash-up broker’ that facilitates creation of certain standard combinations of mash-ups. Will explore that idea sometime in the coming weeks, but let me go back to the idea of licensing of aggregated platform).

The reason why Voice 2.0 applications are disparate and offered direct to the consumer is because telcos look rather incompatible here. Not only are they slow with deploying applications, telcos lack the back office infrastructure to bring in and monetize these applications. Then they have to be convinced that the platform they are deploying is scalable and robust. Their predominantly TDM infrastructure does not allow them to fully embrace IP based voice-web mash-ups. But these same providers have been offering voice over broadband as a parallel voice offering which is VoIP based. Surely they can test an aggregated Voice 2.0 feature server there. That would be an organized way of tackling this voice-web mash-up thing.