Ribbit acquired by British Telecom

July 9th, 2008 admin Posted in IfByPhone, Ribbit, Voice 2.0 |

Today, the news hit that Voice 2.0 platform player Ribbit is being bought out for $55 million by British Telecom.  Great work by the Ribbit team. Full disclosure: My employer is IfByPhone, which - roughly speaking - plays in the same space as Ribbit.

It’s not particularly clear why BT is making this move, particularly for such a premium.  TechCruch thinks it’s about building a competitor to GrandCentral.  GrandCentral was bought by Google, and has been languishing on the sidelines since. Thomas Howe things that is hogwash, and I agree with him.  An excerpt:

It doesn’t pass Occam’s razor: there’s a simpler reason why BT would buy Ribbit. If BT recognizes that their Enterprise customers will deploy communications enabled business process applications, and Ribbit has some 3,000 developers already, and it looks like Adobe Flash has more traction than (ick) SOAP… you get the picture.

I definitely agree that BT buying Ribbit to build a GrandCentral competitor makes little sense.  The consumer end of things, which really is where GrandCentral is right now, is going to be higher cost of entry, higher risk (because the market of paying customers simply doesn’t exist yet).  The real reason, and Thomas hits it on the head here, is that businesses are coming on board with the idea that they can add voice to their existing business processes.  And one of the limitations of Ribbit (the idea that you have to use Adobe Flex) goes away.  BT can just build a team of developers that will build these processes for their customers.

This is similar to what many bigger Telco companies (like a former employer of mine, West Corporation) is doing.  So it shouldn’t shock anyone that  a Telco is interested in a company that will make it easier for them to integrate further with their existing companies.  They’ve been losing out on a great deal of business in this area, and buying Ribbit is a pretty neat and clean solution to get in the game quickly.

Also Read: VoipSupply on the Ribbit deal.

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Viewing 2 Comments

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    You were with West? I've been following IfByPhone for awhile, you guys are doing some interesting things. I worked in many different capacities years ago with a pioneering IVR service bureau called IVR, Inc. ....now part of Prosodie in France. We developed DTMF and Speech applications on a Dialogic/Visual Voice and Nuance platform....back then we struggled to cobble our applications with the web. Today's ease of integration makes a lot of apps that pushed the envelope of usability 7-10 years ago much more viable. Add SIP to the mix, you have some pretty versatile tools.
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    I was with Centerpost, which was then acquired by West. I liked working for both companies. I have to say that the conversion from start up to big company went really well. The whole culture changed of course, but that's bound to happen.

    Thanks for the compliment to IfByPhone too. I think one of the big benefits that we have at IfByPhone is that we're pretty nimble still, and we grew up as a Web\Voice company. So the integration was there from the start. Larger companies are going to have to work really hard not only to pull in the web functionality, but to integrate into their existing huge systems. I think that's one reason why Ribbit was so appealing to BT.

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