Interview with Ted Griggs, CEO, Ribbit

Why provide a service rather than license the platform to service providers?

Our background is actually building platforms for carriers. Our team built platforms, and enhanced applications on top of those platforms, for AT&T, Sprint, Pacbell, GTE and several wireline and wireless carriers. What we experienced is that innovation always came from carriers and at their own initiative. Your fantastic features and APIs don’t mean much to them. At the end of the day, what we found was that carriers did not have the infrastructure or the business model to allow their networks to be opened for third party developers. With Ribbit, we have switched gears a little. We decided instead to open the platform to developers. And we are not going to wait for two years to bring new features to consumers that could be offered yesterday.

There are service bureaus out there like Tellme that offer something similar to enterprises. Would you regard them as similar to Ribbit?

We have seen service bureaus out there that serve large enterprises providing APIs that are telco oriented. These companies use SIP APIs but there are very few developers out there that really understand SIP stacks. We are trying to make those APIs one level easier. We provide Flash APIs so that the developer does not have to necessarily know the bits and bytes of telephony protocols.

Is time-to-market the main reason why you go direct to the consumer or is it the lack of compatible carrier infrastructure?

The issue is the time it takes carriers to incorporate things into their network. The issue I think is much less how they open up their APIs to the core elements of their network. You see some of the progressive carriers attempting to do this. BT has their web21c program. But even so it is coming on slow. And again if you look at the interfaces that are being provided it is being provided with the concept of deriving a telephony application, adding telephony to an existing workflow type of application for example.

This model can easily be replicated by social networking sites like Facebook. Are we looking at some sort of competition from those guys in the future? They could aggregate these Voice 2.0 applications and offer a services bundle.

It is possible. But telephony is a different game than providing various types of web services. You have to have telephony experience. There is also the billing issue. In communications we have applications that we need to bill for and we are going to see that for a long time to come. Social networking sites generate revenues based on advertising. It is very hard to subsidise phone calls through advertisements today. Social networking sites have a different mentality. We help developers monetize the application. Facebook type sites are not concerned about monetization aspect of the applications.

How many developers do you work with?

We have over 2500 developers on our platform.

If I am a developer with $50k budget to develop an application and I have two options, one being Sylantro platform and the other option being Ribbit platform, how would you convince me to go for Ribbit rather than Sylantro?

I would say, look at the features and the environment we provide. You should really use the platform that works best for you. What Ribbit provides a web developer is the ability to incorporate web telephony into any flash enabled web browser. So that means you have potentially close to a billion end points out there that can run your application. With Sylantro type platforms you have to have a relationship not only with them but also have to work with the carrier, apart from worrying about the APIs. That is a tough environment for a developer to work in.

Companies like Sylantro and Broadsoft are also leveraging the developer ecosystem.

Companies like Broadsoft and Sylantro have focused on traditional voice market. Ribbit focuses on how voice in its transformed format is being used in conjunction with web. We studied how people were using voice on the web. For certain people, using IM clients and things like Skype turns out to be as important as using cell phone. With Ribbit platform you have access to using Skype and IM clients as terminals. You also have the ability to enable browser as a terminal. So we have taken the approach of leveraging what is already being used out there on web and let our developers use those terminals integrating them into their application. So it is a different approach and I don’t see Sylantro or Broadsoft addressing these types of developers.

Can you tell me a bit about your Class 5 platform? Was it developed from scratch or acquired from another company?

The founders here had started a previous company called Syndeo and that company built a Class 5 softswitch. Syndeo did a good job with abstracting the application layer from the underlying legacy and VoIP protocols. Ribbit acquired the assets of Syndeo about three years ago. We did two things with the platform. We added IM and flash based protocols and put APIs on top of the service layer. We spent the last two years really understanding what kind of platform would make sense for web developers. And we decided to focus on flash APIs versus SIP or XML or other approaches.

I dealt with Syndeo long time back and as far as I remember they were focused on cable companies and had some customers especially in Japan. Is that cable legacy in form of MGCP and Packetcable still part of the platform and would that cause any problems going forward?

Packetcable legacy has actually improved several aspects of our platform. Cable standards have a lot of stuff on QoS monitoring and security that were much more mature in comparison to other NGN standardisation programs.

How important is the flash part to your platform and are you apprehensive about Adobe VoIP plans if they optimize the flash technology for their own VoIP platform?

Adobe has a couple of voice projects that they are working on internally. But they seems to be mostly focused on codecs. They recently released new codecs to improve the video side. What Adobe is not likely to venture into is becoming a service provider or a service bureau.