Three emails are not "best efforts". 4.5 months notice is not "best effort".
My opinion on best effort: I founded, ran, and sold a SaaS company used by some of the most well known companies in the world. Our "best effort" was a minimum of 12 months notice, with a six month grace period afterwards. Emails weekly. Phone calls at least once a month. Reach out to customer leadership if no response. Then scream test as others suggested.
Thank you for the feedback and for pointing out the typo on the technology page.
We discussed the "language" issue extensively before this announcement. The fundamental challenge we faced was that this announcement - at this time - is not targeted at developers. The "gushing market-speak" and press release language were intended for a specific audience. Based on the companies who contacted us to learn more about Ameche yesterday, it appears we reached our specific target market as we desired.
We will have a more in-depth, technology and developer focused Ameche announcement and release at a later time.
You mentioned "In the past, I've [used] Voxeo IVR platforms..." and I wanted to comment on that.
Voxeo's IVR platform (Prophecy) is recognized by Gartner and Datamonitor as industry leading. Prophecy is used in the largest IVR deployments in the world (more than 50,000 ports for a single customer application) and the smallest (single-line micro-banking applications in Africa).
Voxeo is also extremely customer focused. We have a reputation for being so that is shown by our customer retention rate (over 99%) and customer satisfaction scores.
I and everyone else at Voxeo are extremely interested in improving Prophecy and our other products in any way possible. If you have any specific criticism of our platforms or our documentation I'd love to hear it. I'll pay you for your time to talk with us about the things you disliked. Please let me know if you'd be up for that. You can reply here or contact me via @visionik on Twitter.
I am the largest shareholder in Voxeo. I never went to college. I'm allergic to dust mites. I'm a habitual abuser of allergy medicines. I've listened to nothing but The White Stripes for three months and it's altered my DNA. I routinely squash the hopes and dreams of our youth by slaying them in Call of Duty. And I only own four hats.
Full Clojure:
visionik=> (apply str (interpose "." ["Voxeo Shareholder" "No College" "Dust Mites" "White Stripes" "Call of Duty" "Four Hats"]))
Thank you for asking. "Enterprise grade" can be a vague marketing term. This is what Voxeo means when we say PRISM is "enterprise grade":
1. Fault tolerant: Including the ability to do state-full failover of applications from one PRISM server instance to another.
2. Scalable: Proven ability to scale to over 25,000 calls per server.
3. High performance: Proven ability to scale to over 800 call setups (new calls) per second per server.
4. Standards-based: PRISM implements the Java SIP servlet standards (JSR-289) and Java Media Control standard (JSR-309). PRISM applications can run unmodified on similar platforms from Oracle, IBM, and Redhat - and vice versa.
5. Support: PRISM is backed by a company with guaranteed 24x7 support, under 20 minute response times, over 150 employees, world-wide offices, financial stability, and 10 years of experience.
On top of that, yes, PRISM is often used in the enterprise and by service providers. :)
PRISM is also used for everything we do at Voxeo. All of our products and services, including Tropo, are built on top of PRISM.
PRISM is a highly scalable, reliable, and extensible communications application server. It's a very proven platform and is used by several of the largest consumer and commercial VoIP providers. It's also used in Microsoft's Tellme service and is the foundation of all of Voxeo's products and services.
Asterisk can be painful, but they have a new ground-up project in very-early (pre-beta) stage called Asterisk SCF that is designed to achieve PRISM-like capabilities.
You make a great point, but it's also somewhat disingenuous ;)
It takes some time to learn how to use a platform.
It takes some time to code on a platform.
The actual writing of code is easiest when you are doing small applications. However, when you are writing larger applications the coding becomes the larger portion of time.
Today it's easier to learn Twilio than Tropo - largely because Tropo needs better documentation (that's coming very soon). However, I will contend that once you know the platform, Tropo is easier - and much more powerful.
I think that's what others are saying in this thread. We've also heard that from customers who have switched from Twilio to Tropo.
None of this should be surprising to anyone. Voxeo has been doing developer-centric telephony for ten years. Voxeo knows all the little problems and challenges that can come up over time and we've built a platform to address them.
Twilio is new to the industry, they came at things with a fresh set of eyes and were able to "re-factor" the simplicity and usability yet again with that fresh perspective.
I say "re-factor" because it's exactly what we did at Voxeo when we started in 1999. The experience reminds me of Battlestar Galactica: All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
Hi - Tropo should cost about the same as Twilio depending on your use case, but Tropo does alot more than Twilio for a roughly equivalent price. For example. Twilio just does SMS, Tropo does SMS and IM. Tropo adds speech recognition and higher quality speech synthesis, etc.
Also, I wanted to make sure I understand, what kind of specifics did you feel are lacking in Diggz post? We love to learn how to improve our product and our communication about it. If you are up for discussing it we will give you $100 on Amazon or Paypal for your time. Just email me at jtaylor at voxeo dot com.
Woah there, your post is misleading and I want to make sure no one is confused as a result.
You said you inquired about Voxeo/Tropo but the pricing you mention above has absolutely nothing to do with Tropo.
Tropo is 100% free for development use - always.
Production Tropo pricing starts at 3 cents per minute with free second-leg (connected) calls, free voice recognition, free high-quality speech synthesis, free 24x7 support, no minimum, and no port limitations.
Thanks for the info. Looks like I should re-evaluate things as at the time Tropo seemed to be a coming-soon/developer-only service that didn't have details around production pricing nailed down. The Prophecy IVR info scared me into thinking that Tropo might have similar limitations.
That's a great summary. A good analogy is that Tropo is 30% harder to learn than Twilio... but it can do 300% more than Twilio.
We've got a big release coming that makes Tropo much easier to use. Entirely new documentation, sanded off some of the rough edges on features, added new ones to make some use cases simpler.
I'd love to hear about the specific road bumps that made it harder for you, it would really help us improve our simplicity. We will give you $100 on Amazon or Paypal for your time. If you're interested email jtaylor at voxeo dot com.
If Tropo can do anything to help you in China please let us know. Asia is a key market for Voxeo/Tropo. We have two data centers there (Singapore and Hong Kong), as well as an R&D, support, and sales team with about a dozen people in Beijing. Feel free to email me at jtaylor at voxeo dot com.
My opinion on best effort: I founded, ran, and sold a SaaS company used by some of the most well known companies in the world. Our "best effort" was a minimum of 12 months notice, with a six month grace period afterwards. Emails weekly. Phone calls at least once a month. Reach out to customer leadership if no response. Then scream test as others suggested.