Web 2 Voice

Saw the news first on Luca’s blog (OFFICIAL: BT acquires Ribbit for 105 Million).  The press release can be found here. I discussed this previously here, mainly agreeing with Thomas Howe’s take.  But in reading the press release, it sounds as if BT paid $105 million for easier access to developers.

Some snippets:

JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT, said: ‘Silicon Valley is emerging as a hotbed of telecommunications innovation. With Ribbit, not only do we extend our presence in the Valley, but we also gain a groundbreaking platform, a growing community of developers and a world-class team that share a common vision. Buying Ribbit lets us accelerate that vision.’

Since its launch, Ribbit has attracted thousands of developers, launched an innovative solution for the enterprise software market, and has begun testing a consumer application scheduled for general release later this year. The acquisition of the Ribbit platform will complement BT’s existing capability in the software platform space with its award-winning Software Development Kit (SDK) initiative. BT’s SDKs enable developers to integrate new applications with BT’s services using a single line of code.

I’m in the Voice 2.0 industry.  This is great news for me, my employer, and the industry as a whole.  BT would seem to ‘get it’ so to speak.  When I translate this deal, I think that BT understand the value of CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processing), and apparently Ribbit’s relationship with developers (presumably mainly Flex developers).

So at this point, it’s not important whether they’re going to build a ‘Grand Central’ competitor or Skype competitor.  It seems like BT just wants to stay a step ahead of the game.  Just think if there was a company that had actual off the shelf applications, an API that didn’t force you to use any particular language and a low price point.  I wonder what that would be worth?  Just asking.

EDIT: You should go check out Thomas’ take here.

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. 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.