Ribbit's platform promise

The addition of Ribbit’s highly successful voice applications development platform to BT’s 21st century network development, innovation capabilities and award winning SDKs holds significant potential and will have positive impact for the industry at large.

That’s the view of BT Design’s managing director of strategy, communications and innovation, JP Rangaswami, who says open, multi-sided platforms like Ribbit’s are integral to BT’s open innovation strategy.

“BT’s acquisition of Ribbit is a platform play rather than an application play,” says J.P. Rangaswami. “It will open the door for communities, corporations and customers to benefit from continuing innovation in web and voice integration. We can look forward to the development of more and more communications enabled processes that help businesses to increase productivity and improve the quality of experience for end users.”

Established in 2006, Silicon Valley-based Ribbit has gained acclaim for developing an open platform for multi-protocol communication which has contributed to a revitalised market for voice applications and services.

The company has since played a significant role in promoting a fresh approach to voice communication itself – rather than seeing it as a 20th century ‘silo’ application it is viewed as a feature used for richly enhancing web 2.0 communications or CRM applications and services.

Ribbit’s technology brings together communications over mobile phones, landlines, desktop applications and internet applications. One example is Ribbit’s soon-to-be-launched consumer application which allows you to manage voicemail like e-mail from the desktop, with the capability for audio messages to be transcribed into searchable text.

Social media integration

Developers have already used Ribbit’s platform to integrate voice into leading CRM solution Salesforce.com and have built voice applications that can be embedded into Facebook or other social media platforms.

“The beauty of Ribbit’s platform is that it can integrate services such as messaging, voice, conference calls into web application and deliver customised solutions in hours or days at a fraction of the cost of large packaged applications or custom development projects,” said J.P. Rangaswami. “It gives developers, integrators and product inventors the opportunity to ride on its platform and use APIs(application programming interface) to create new communication solutions for private businesses, global enterprises, vertical markets and the masses.”

J.P. Rangaswami predicts a pretty straightforward integration of Ribbit with BT, although the company will keep its name and a large degree of autonomy. “Ribbit’s creative client-side innovation complements perfectly the work BT’s SDK team has been doing on the network and server side to package elements of our voice expertise. Together, the platform and this know how is a potent combination with exciting potential for all of BT’s customer groups.”

He says: “The important thing is that Ribbit’s technology now gets to extend its global footprint by becoming a partner of BT and utilising BT’s 21CN global innovation platform. For BT, not only do we extend our presence in the hotbed of telecommunications innovation that is Silicon Valley, but we gain a ground-breaking platform, a growing community of developers and a world-class team that shares a common vision. Ribbit means we can accelerate that vision.”