Unified Communications Featured Article

Voxbone Talks VoIP and ITEXPO

By Alicia Young
Web Editor

By all accounts, 2017 is shaping up to be the year of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Countless studies, companies and articles have suggested that the VoIP services market is going to hit its stride in the coming years, making communications much easier for everyone who has hopped on the bandwagon.

One company working to make a difference in the VoIP realm is Voxbone. According to its site, “Voxbone (News - Alert) believes in a world where ordering and configuring Voice over IP (VoIP) telecom services is as simple as buying any Internet service.” To make this goal a reality, Voxbone plays its part by providing automated access to the global voice network. It does this by combining a high quality infrastructure with the flexibility of VoIP.

Essentially, Voxbone provides telephone numbers that make is possible for people to call from almost anywhere in the world. It offers worldwide geographic, toll-free and iNum (News - Alert) telephone numbers that support high quality inbound communications from 60 countries and more than 9,000 cities.

Luckily for those interested, Voxbone is taking a brief break to exhibit at ITEXPO this coming February 8-10 in Fort Lauderdale, FL. There, attendees can meet up with Voxbone at booth 812 to discuss VoIP and any questions they may have.

To prepare for ITEXPO, TMC (News - Alert) caught up with Dries Plasman, VP of Product Management at Voxbone, to discuss the company’s successes over the past year, and its predictions for the future. The full exchange can be seen below.

How have technology changes over the past 12 months helped businesses grow?

WebRTC is five years old but has really taken off in the past year, and it is seeing more growth than any previous VoIP technology. We are likely to see more apps and services that use WebRTC architecture enter the market and expect adoption of this technology attract a greater user-base than ever. 

Developments in big data are allowing service providers of all kinds to visualize trends like user behaviors, on a greater scale and with better accuracy. As analytic capabilities get more advanced, companies are able to make better decisions, in shorter time frames, to meet the demands of rapid growth.

Advancements in virtualization are helping companies run off-premises services and IT platforms more efficiently and with a higher quality of service. Cloud service providers are increasingly able to scale their cost-effective services rapidly and on a global scale.

Are you leveraging big data/analytics to operate more efficiently?

At Voxbone, we use big data for internal reporting in order to make better decisions, faster. For our services, we visualize diverse sets of aggregate usage and quality-of-service data in real time. While usage data provides us with business intelligence, QoS data is an additional tool for service management and has become our main differentiator over the competition.

To what extent are you leveraging APIs to enhance business opportunities?

In June 2016 we launched The Workshop, Voxbone’s developer playground for testing and refining new communications services. By default, every service we offer comes with an API. In 2017, it would be a big mistake not to, as companies are increasingly focused on integrating value-added services to their core business, by leveraging APIs from third-party providers “as a service.” 

Internally, we launched an online service management portal for our customers. This is a key element to the service we provide, as out provisioning and service management processes are fully automated. This way of working allows us to expose our ordering and service management customers both through a web portal as well as through an API.

What emerging technology has the potential to have a disruptive impact on businesses in the coming years?

WebRTC is gaining ground as the most successful VoIP technology of recent years, with adoption rates projected to skyrocket over other technologies and protocols in use today. With consumer products like Facebook (News - Alert) Messenger and Snapchat, as well as business tools like GoToMeeting and Slack using WebRTC, there is greater potential for this technology to have an impact on the way businesses communicate in the near future. 

How has your business’ product development evolved over the past year as a result of emerging technologies?

As WebRTC has become more of a popular and useful technology, we have made our DIDs and SIP trunks reachable by integrating a “WebRTC to SIP gateway” as a service, along with a click-to-call widget generator. This allows Voxbone customers to integrate WebRTC into their web applications, and deliver the call within their existing SIP trunks with Voxbone without any coding. This and other new WebRTC services are being developed and experimented on in our communications tooling program, The Workshop.

Also taking place in The Workshop are the development of APIs, and we’ve started offering a core network functions “as a service” to our customers, such as audio conferencing mixing and recording. Through the use of APIs, we can allow users to offload some of these functions to our network so that they can save costs or become more efficient when expanding geographically.