Cloudvox Provides Access to Ifbyphone Conferencing App, Global Infrastructure

Ifbyphone's acquisition of Cloudvox in January brought together two distinct approaches to commercial telephony platform services. Ifbyphone offered sophisticated ready-built apps that companies could access on a per-minute or per-port basis. Cloudvox offered a set of building blocks that let developers create their own apps using common open-source programming languages. Now Cloudvox has taken a significant step towards integrating the two approaches. A newly announced upgrade of its platform allows developers to write their own apps that also access some of Ifbyphone's powerful capabilities. It has also lowered and simplified pricing for the Cloudvox service.

A key aspect of the upgrade is that it lets Cloudvox developers make use of Ifbyphone's conferencing app. The app lets users do things like set up conferences, add and remove participants, play MP3 audio files during conferences, and record conferences. All developers need do is write applications that address the Ifbyphone conferencing API. That relieves them of the need to create such sophisticated features themselves, and makes it easy to include conferencing as part of otherwise custom-built apps of any sort. In short, says Cloudvox CEO Troy Davis, "They can use conference calling as just another building block."

The new integration also gives Cloudvox developers access to Ifbyphone's robust global infrastructure. That infrastructure provides, among other things, connectivity via local numbers around the world. Another change is that all Cloudvox customers can now pay on a purely per-use basis, at a rate of 3 cents per minute of user access to the platform. Formerly they had to pay a monthly service fee for access to the platform's full capabilities, in addition to a per-minute rate.

Comments

[Troy]

Thanks Robert. Removing the monthly fee has eliminated a huge barrier for us, and we've already seen folks create apps that they wouldn't have been able to a week ago.