Ifbyphone's Cloudvox Buy Highlights Questions About Platforms' Future

Ifbyphone's acquisition of Cloudvox brought together two approaches to the hosted platform services business. One involves selling access to ready-to-use applications developed by the platform provider itself. That's what Ifbyphone has done from the start. The other involves providing the basic building blocks that allow developers to create their own apps. That's what Cloudvox was invented to do. The acquisition will allow Ifbyphone to do both. The question is which approach, if either, will predominate in the future.

Other platform providers started from the opposite end of the spectrum from Ifbyphone, hoping to attract hordes of independent developers that would create a tsunami of innovative apps. The goal was to unleash the creativity of the developer community the way Apple's App Store did with the iPhone. But some of those providers also ended up building their own applications, simply to show their platforms' potential, and some of those apps ended up showing particular commercial promise. That could tempt the platform providers to move towards more self-development, particularly if the hoped-for numbers of independent developers don't appear.

For the record, the acquisition wasn't at base a pitch by Ifbyphone to attract independent developers. According to CEO Irv Shapiro, the main reason for the buy was to fill a gap for Ifbyphone's existing and prospective SMB customers. Many such customers use Ifbyphone's pre-built apps as is, or take advantage of the platform's robust APIs to integrate those apps with their own corporate apps. But some, according to Shapiro, found that even with such integration, the apps didn't fill their precise needs. Thus they wanted to be able to write their own apps and run them on the Ifbyphone platform. With the addition of Cloudvox's platform, and its planned integration with the existing platform, Ifbyphone will be able to meet such demand. And of course, if independent development does eventually take off, it will be perfectly positioned to take advantage of that trend as well.

Comments

[Troy Davis]

Interesting question. I'm not sure how representative Cloudvox is of other platforms. We didn't try to brand Cloudvox as a proprietary service, and tried deliberately not to lock people in. It's closer to Heroku or EC2 - very flexible voice app hosting - than to a Web app.