Virtual Telephony Changed Today
What Happened?
As you might have heard, Twilio launched a massive new product this morning that’s going make a huge dent in the Virtual PBX market. It’s called OpenVBX.
A little history
Twilio flew me out to San Francisco in March to get a look at an early version and I was very impressed. We had a weekend hackathon and created plugins for it… but more about that later.
The advent of VBX changed the course of my startup, OtherNum, drastically. We had been constructing, for almost a year, a platform very similar. We had some features VBX did not but over the course of that weekend I was able to start filling in those gaps.
Jeff and the team at Twilio had wanted me to come out and see VBX because they knew about OtherNum and were aware of the overlap between the products. When Jeff first told us why we had been brought to SF (we didn’t know until that first morning) I was a little stunned but as we learned more about the platform the more I realized this was a very good thing for us.
Some of the things we had struggled with or were about to tackle (like a drag and drop call flow editor) were already in VBX. It didn’t make sense for us to continue building OtherNum anymore. Instead I chose to pursue some sub-niches instead of primary PBX-like functionality and to work on plugins for VBX.
So what is VBX?
VBX is an open source web application that interacts with Twilio’s API to implement advanced telephony functions normally found in expensive equipment.
It’s exactly the right solution for businesses with virtual offices, remote personnel and startups.
Here’s why:
1. It never goes down
If the power goes it in your office your $10,000 PBX is going to go offline. You’ve got battery backup? Are you sure? What if a construction worker cuts the phone lines?
With a hardware PBX, your entire phone infrastructure depends on its physical environment. With a virtual PBX
2. It never fills up
With a hardware solution, the memory available is finite. Sure, you can upgrade it but that costs money and takes time. VBX uses cloud storage for recordings so you’ll never have to shell out cash to add extensions or voicemail boxes.
3. It takes 5 minutes to get started
You’ve heard of the famous 5 minute WordPress install? Yeah. It’s like that.
- pull down the code
- create an empty database
- change permissions on two sub-directories
- pull it up in a browser and enter your Twilio credentials.
- done.
Plugins
So what else is so great about VBX? Plugins.
You want to have your PBX interact with your Twitter or FourSquare account or change its behavior based on time of day. You want your PBX to interact with Chirbit, MyCaption.com or BART. If you had a hardware PBX it would NEVER happen.
VBX makes it possible to write a plugin that does that and more.
My Plugins
I wrote the plugins for Chirbit, FourSquare and MyCaption during that weekend in San Francisco. The FourSquare plugin caught the attention of a bunch of people including TechCrunch, GigaOM, Albert Wenger and Fred Wilson. My head was spinning all morning!
My Other Favorite Plugins
Mark Condon wrote a plugin that allowed you to define prompts in English and used Google APIs to translate your text into French, German and other languages and then speak it to the caller.
Jonathan Kressaty wrote multiple plugins, one of which allows you to change the behavior of your phone system depending on the time of the day.
In Conclusion
I’m very excited to have been a part of the VBX community from such an early stage and I look forward to working with it going forward. I think it’s a great product in a really cool space and it’s going to push the virtual telephony world forward a few notches and in a hurry.
