Now, Voxeo has a platform that gives customers the ability to truly seamlessly deploy hosted, premise-based, or any combination of VoIP and IVR solutions. In addition to the developer portal, they have four fault-resilient hosting facilities and offer what they call Extreme Support.

This week at SpeechTek in New York, they made two pretty big announcements. The first, which adds to their stealth UC story, is the acquisition of Micromethod Technologies, of Beijing, China and San Jose, CA. Micromethod provides SIP-based communication and collaboration software, and with this acquisition Voxeo adds to its SIP product arsenal and also expands its reach into Asia-Pacific.

What wasn't highlighted by Voxeo at SpeechTek was that Micromethod also has a pretty nice set of unified communication capabilities that Voxeo can now take advantage of. Micromethod's SIPoint Server, based on the latest SIMPLE standards, support presence and XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP) with built in SIP Registrar and Proxy. Micromethod also provides video, IM and collaboration as well. Voxeo will sell both their existing SIP products and Micromethod's products and will integrate them into their Prophecy premise software and Evolution hosting.

The second announcement was the early access release of their long awaited Prophecy 9, including a plethora of new features that reduce the cost and complexity of deploying speech applications. New features include Prophecy Commander, which is a new operations, administration, maintenance and provisioning (OAM&P) system, so that customers can manage any Prophecy deployment, from single-server to multi-cluster, on a single server. Prophecy Dashboard is a new visual interface providing a comprehensive overview of any Prophecy server. Prophecy Log Analyst collects and indexes data and call logs for real-time or scheduled business intelligence and analytics delivered through a web-based search-focused interface. Both Prophecy Commander and Dashboard are delivered as highly usable Rich Internet Applications.

Although Prophecy supports any speech recognition or text-to-speech engine that supports a standard MRCP interface, they also have their own speech engine, Prophecy Recognizer, which they improved in this release with the addition of support for UK British English, and enhanced speech detection and noise reduction. In addition, they added Prophecy Recorder, which is a secure, two-way call recording platform for IVR and contact centers, eliminating the need for customers to purchase a separate recording platform. Recorder is Payment Card Industry (PCI)-compliant, and supports GSM compressed recording to a standard .WAV file, thereby greatly reducing audio storage costs.

Once again some things are free. Prophecy 9 comes with two free ports, or phone lines, and is available here.

In addition to the acquisition of new SIP products through Micromethod Technologies, Voxeo made some significant upgrades to its own SIP offerings. Prophecy SIPcore adds support for the latest IMS and SIP standards for VoIP, including encrypted-TLS SIP connections, SIP REFER for network call transfers, and SIP-T for SS7 and SIP integration. Prophecy integrates with any SIP platform, provider, or device.

Finally, Prophecy already supports Windows, but Voxeo has added support for both Mac OS X and any Intel-based Centos 5 or RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 system. Voxeo claims that this is the first comprehensive, standards-based telephony application platform to support Mac OS X.

So what about UC? Well, it's just that Voxeo fits so well into a UC environment due to the strength of their SIP-based voice application server/IVR solution. They are already embedded into the contact center, self service and speech arenas, and have some UC functionality already. The acquisition of Micromethod adds some core UC functionality that they didn't have. With this, and the added solutions they provide for managing any combination of single server, hosted, premise, hybrid - you name it - configurations, this is just ripe to be slotted into a UC implementation. Plus with the addition of support for Linux and Mac, this opens up a door of opportunity for more companies to work with them. This announcement makes me believe that we are looking at one of the next big entrants into the UC market, and I wouldn't be surprised to see more out of Voxeo on this subject in the near future.