After three years of blood, sweat, and tears at StarPound, I’ve decided that it’s time to move on.

We achieved a great number of successes over the past few years, and I’m incredibly proud of the entire team. When I joined the company, it was a 3 person company (that had been whittled back from 80 or so at one point) Our initial VC had long written off their original $4M investment, with that particular fund approaching sunset. The product wasn’t really complete, and subsequently, there were no customers.

Since then, we:

• Got the product stable and out the door – the world’s most advanced open source BPM and call center platform


• Secured our first customers, including a Fortune Global 100 company, the largest in its industry


• Designed, built and launched another incredible product in Teledini, a mashable VOIP/SIP phone for the browser


• Received a lot of really awesome recognition by the community, including TechAmerica’s Spirit of Endeavor Awards, TAG Top 40 Innovative Company (twice), and named to VARGUY’s Open Source 50 list for 2 straight years (alongside Red Hat, MYSQL, Drupal, SugarCRM, and others).


• Brought in another round of investment, and provided a financial exit for our initial venture capital investor

Even more importantly, we came together as a team and overcame an almost unimaginable collection of obstacles. We truly became friends for life and created an amazing company culture. When you see each other more than you see your own families, suffice it to say you tend to form very strong bonds. This is largely why this decision was incredibly difficult for me to make.

My reasons for leaving are varied. Some are personal, some are professional. Nevertheless, my departure is very amicable, and I feel that I am leaving the company in significantly better shape than it was when I joined. I may remain involved on the board, or as an adviser, which is cool. I’ll be working with the team over the next month or so to transition everything and to reach our next development milestone.

So, what’s next for me? Well, the first thing on the agenda is our first family vacation in almost seven years. Definitely way past due.

One of the side effects of becoming completely immersed in any effort is that it can become an incredible time sink. If you know me at all, you know that I really enjoy working with the larger startup community on various things (StartupLounge, TI:GER, various business plan competitions, lecturing/speaking, mentoring, coaching, etc.) Unfortunately, a lot of those activities had to take a back seat for a while. I’m definitely looking forward to re-engaging with the community that I loved so dearly.

Beyond that, I have a few ideas I’m tossing around, and a few other irons in the fire, as it were – so we’ll see.

Thanks to everyone on the StarPound team for all of your hard work and sacrifices over the past few years. I wish you all the very best!

Cheers.

What is StyroFone?

StyroFone (henceforth referred to as simply “SF”) is a mashable, SIP compatible soft phone distributed as a browser plugin.  It isn’t a Flash phone, or anything like that.  We decided to distribute it as a browser plugin to provide persistence of voice connectivity from page to page, as well as to provide a better platform for mashups.

@zlu had a pretty good summary: @zlu #styrofone, takes the guts out of skype and puts in the browser!

At StarPound, we love our beer, and why not?  Let’s face it – when most people think about IP telephony and converged applications, they immediately think of beer.  We are no different.  So, one afternoon, Wei Wang (CTO) and I were at our local watering hole near the office discussing this and that.  Short version – a few beers later, we had conceived the idea behind SF, and started working on the prototype.

The phone app itself is fully SIP compliant, with full codec support (G.711, G.729, et al), echo cancellation,  and can be used with any SIP service provider or switch.

We have a few major goals in the design of the phone.

First and foremost, we wanted it to be seamlessly integrated into the browser.  By this, I mean that it should not disrupt or deter from the surfing experience.  It should augment it.   The phone should not be “intrusive”, but “supportive”.  Don’t want to see the phone?  It minimizes and resizes like Firebug.  We’ve also implemented things like customizable click-to-call capabilities (phone links on web pages are turned into links which popup the phone and start dialing the number for you).

Right now, we’re targeting Firefox/PC for the initial launch, but we’re going to expand that as quickly as possible to IE, and for Macs. And yes, we’re looking at the iPad as well.

The second goal was to ensure that the phone was “mashable”.  See the screenshot below for an idea of what we’re talking about:

So, a call comes in, and all of a sudden, you get to see cool things about that person, like CRM data, Twitter feeds, blog feeds, their Flickr feed, remote weather, etc.  You get the idea.

There is a full API as well, for controlling the phone (making calls, call control for conferencing, etc.).  This is extended into the widget area as well.  The widgets are all driven by what we call an “event bus”, so they can send and receive standard SF events, as well as their own custom events.  Widgets can communicate not only with the phone itself, but also other widgets.

The widget API can also be used to fully integrate into your PBX for voicemail management, user directories, etc:

We’re also incorporating browser sharing, so while you’re talking with someone, you can collaborate over the web together. If you want to bring another colleague into the collaboration conference (or even just a voice conference), you can just drag them into the phone. :)

StyroFone also has a TON of applicability within vertical markets.  Consider customer service and call centers.  How about your customers conversing with a customer service agent over voice/video/collab at the same time?  Yeah, it looks cool – can’t do a screenshot of that just yet, but trust me … it’s cool as hell.

We use SF for calls all the time internally at StarPound.  I even had a conference call at a local cafe over SF and local WiFi.  It pairs nicely with USB Bluetooth headsets as well. :)

We think this is all pretty cool stuff. However, what is probably even cooler than the phone, is the business model we are refining for it.  The phone itself will be freely available, so you’ll be able to download it and use it for personal use.  But our business model, we think, will allow us to offer a completely free phone service for subscribers.  When we say free, we don’t just mean SF-to-SF.  I’m talking about SF to PSTN, cell, etc.  A free global communications network.  This is our goal, although this will not be a day-one service.

There’s a LOT more to StyroFone than I have time (or authority) to discuss right now.  However, I will no doubt write more about SF as we move closer to the next beta cycle.  If you are interested, you can head to styrofone.com and apply for it.

Cheers.

So why I have been incommunicado lately, or as @Unblakeable puts it, apparently in the witness protection program?  We’ve been heads down working on the next release of our platform, and launching several new customers (including a Global Fortune 100 customer – whee!).  Oh, and talking with investors, growing our base of channel partners, and pulling more than a few all-nighters. Suffice it to say that “free time” is somewhat of a myth around our office these days.

At any rate, I thought I would take a few minutes to share some of the new stuff that is in StarPound v1.3.  This release represents a tremendous step forward in the evolution of our platform, and ushers in a promising new phase for our company. After months of intense development, we firmly believe that this release represents the most advanced open-source Customer Interaction Management platform in the world. It is one that remains unique in it’s blend of business process management with advanced call center functionality.

Think Avaya – but think free. Yup.  Skills-based routing, cost-based routing, work queues, multi-channel communications, etc. That’s where we’re going, and to a very large extent, we are there with the 1.5 million lines of code in this release. Right now, it looks like we should be finished up and ready to release this version in the next week or so.

Some of the key features, changes, and other highlights of the v1.3 release are described below:

Greatly Enhanced Stability and Scalability

One of the areas we’ve really been focused on over the past 12 months is the “enterprise readiness” of our platform. We have spent quite a bit of time, energy, and money dedicated to the stress testing of the platform. Since v1.2 we’ve addressed over 200 defects, and have performed hundreds of hours of stress testing under a variety of different configurations and conditions. Particular emphasis was also placed upon the horizontal scalability of the StarPound platform.  Throughout this entire process, we’ve been iterating the platform, getting feedback, and testing it, in a live production environment with hundreds of agents servicing several very large Fortune customers.  The net result is the most stable and scalable release of the StarPound platform to-date.

Full Support for FreeSwitch

When we released StarPound CORE v1.2 last year, one of the key new features was our initial support for FreeSWITCH. If you aren’t familiar with FreeSWITCH, it is a pretty advanced open-source telephony platform for call switching, PBX, and media serving functionality, which competes directly with Asterisk. Well, in StarPound v1.3, we’ve expanded our support for FreeSWITCH.

In this release, we’ve replaced the original SIP-based call-control with native socket-based call-control using FreeSWITCH’s native command set. The result is vastly improved performance, and reduced consumption of system resources.

Telephony/Switching Abstraction Layer

Dovetailing on what was described above for FreeSWITCH, we’ve rearchitected the way that StarPound CORE communicates with backend telecom switches. As our desire is to be as agnostic as possible, we’ve implemented a Telephony Abstraction Layer that provides the interface model for call-control, media serving, etc. This version of StarPound will be distributed with three built-in connectors: generic SIP, Asterisk, and FreeSWITCH. Given the new architecture, it should make it easier to add connectors for other platforms down the road (we’re already in talks with certain commercial vendors about creating connectors for their switches as well).

Interval Metric Reporting

One of the cool new features of StarPound|Call Center v1.3 is an interval reporting capability. On a per-organization basis, the system collects and stores various data points, such as call detail activity, agent work activity, and agent status. This data now rolls up into our real-time dashboard view, where StarPound can calculate and report on things such as agent efficiency and average call hold time over each interval.

New StarPound API

As part of v1.3 of StarPound, we have introduced the first phase of our new API. Currently, the API supports about 60 web service calls (SOAP or REST) into StarPound PBX, and provides full access into everything from voicemails and extension management to custom ring plans (ring multiple devices, find me/follow me, a la Google-Voice, etc) for users. We will be further extending the API down the road to provide additional functionality for the API, including hooks into the call center platform.

Revised Documentation

As with most open source projects, our documentation always seems to lag behind the development of the codebase itself. We’ve spent quite a bit of effort in trying to bring our documentation up to snuff with the latest features and functionality of the platform. We’ve also moved our documentation from Word/PDF format into the web, which should make searching much easier.

And speaking of new web site – our new one, which will launch at the same time, provides a lot more in the way of fostering the growing community around our platform.  Forums, trouble tickets, FAQs, searchable documentation, how-to guides, tutorials, videos, etc.  Good stuff.

StyroFone

One of the coolest new things we’ve been working on is codenamed “StyroFone”.  There have only been a lucky few who have seen this thing in action. Unfortunately, we’re not quite at the point where I’m ready to show it off, but trust me when I say that it is very cool.  I will tell you this, though: I think it has the potential to significantly depreciate a lot of the value from certain PBX and telco providers. Stay tuned to styrofone.com for details as they become available.

I’ll be blogging more about this soon, but we’ve been pretty busy at StarPound lately.  We ended Q4/2009 strong, including the deployment of our platform to solve some major problems for a Fortune 50 customer (largest global player in their industry).  But amid all of the frenetic activity in Q4, something else emerged.  A really, really cool thing that I’ve decided needs to be it’s own thing.

So, to cut to the chase – here is what I am looking for.  Hopefully, some of you may have someone in mind for this:

I’m looking for an energetic, startup-minded developer (C++, Javascript, AJAX, XHTML, CSS, widgets, maybe some PHP, MySQL, etc).  Some Java would be nice, but not required.  The technology is a very unique IP voice application.  I am willing to give this person:

• Fully paid 3-4 bedroom apartment, including utilities – we’ll eventually give you some roommates to work with :)
• Salary, albeit small, but there nonetheless
• Equity in the newco

This person needs to be here in Atlanta, and is ideally a junior level person and is looking for a cool startup opportunity.  This is an awesome chance to get in on the ground floor of something very cool and exciting.

If you have anyone in mind, you can reach me at sburkett AT star-pound-tech dot com (no dashes).

Cheers.

What is it?

If you aren’t familiar with StarPound CORE, it is a software development platform that allows you to visually “model” a business process, web service, voice service, or web application.  That visual model is then deployed onto StarPound Application Server running in the cloud where it becomes a live web or voice service.  If you want to make a change to the application, you change the business process model behind it, not necessarily the actual code.  We’ve built the StarPound platform primarily around the BPMN standard, although we’ve extended it to better support web services and VOIP/SIP call control.  The whole platform is built with Java/J2EE, and is over 1.2 million lines of code and counting …

StarPound Studio, our visual application modeling tool, is built on top of the Eclipse open-source project (another amazing innovation in and of itself). We’ve added a number of really cool features in this release.  Besides updating our build to support the Ganymede edition of Eclipse, we’ve also added support for using Java Beans as BDDs (Business Data Documents).

Another really nifty feature in the latest release of StarPound Studio is our “visual expression builder” for decision gates.  In past releases, if you wanted to create a complex set of decision criteria in a business process flow, you had to stub in custom Java code.  Functional, yes; but a pain in the rear end. Our new expression builder simplifies this process, and tightly couples the decision criteria to the business data in the model.

On the server side, I am really excited about announcing our initial support for FreeSwitch.  FreeSwitch is a free open-source alternative to commercial telephony switching environments (as well as Asterisk, another very popular open-source platform).   We have done extensive testing with FreeSwitch, and are quite pleased with the performance and scalability. Providing support for FreeSwitch extends our vision to be platform agnostic as it pertains to the underlying switching mechanism.

We’ve also made a ton of other enhancements in this latest release, mostly around call handling, work item/work flow, and usability.  A number of improvements have also gone into our open source call center and PBX applications, which we’re also excited about, as these tools provide very scalable open solutions as alternatives to more expensive offerings from players such as Avaya, Cisco, etc.

Another huge step for us this past quarter was our announcement of our successful deployments of StarPound within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).  What do you get when you combine StarPound with the EC2?  How about full-featured call center capabilities for a tiny fraction of the cost per month of a typical commercial solution?  How about an incredibly affordable realtime cloud of active business processes that govern all of your warehouse and inventory activities?  The possibilities (as we’re now finding) are endless.

However, the thing I am most excited about is the traction we’re getting with enterprise customers.  While I desperately wish I could talk about them openly here, I can’t.  Needless to say we are in knee deep with some pretty big customer engagements.  And if that weren’t enough, we’re also hard at work on our next-generation unified communications portal (codenamed “Hannibal”), a really sexy browser-based softphone, a metric-based framework for analyzing business processes and web services in the cloud, an extended developer API, developer network web site (DevNet), extending StarPound Studio with downloadable “palette packs”, and a series of how-to video tutorials.

So, as you can see, it has been pretty quiet lately around our office … :)

More soon …

Cheers.

At any rate, we’ve published a few video tutorials on using the StarPound platform.  If you have an interest in telephony-enabled Internet applications, check em out.

The first tutorial provides a nice introduction to StarPound Studio, and shows you how to build a very simplistic application from start-to-finish.  The second tutorial builds upon the first one, and shows how you can very quickly (and visually) integrate with external web services/SOA.  Good stuff.

We’ll be adding some more videos soon which will cover more advanced topics, including my two favorites: how to build Jajah-like functionality in 15 minutes or less, and how we recreated Google’s Grand Central in just a few days.

We’ll also be diving into some of our vertical market solutions, and show you how our call open source center suite can be used to build call center campaigns in the cloud in just a few minutes.

On a semi-related note, I am pleased to announce that our upcoming January release will offer support for Freeswitch … a very cool platform if you haven’t seen it … as well as the latest release of Asterisk.

Stay tuned …

Cheers.

At any rate, the good news is that we’re hiring.  Job descriptions below – if you know someone that might be a good fit, I’d certainly appreciate any referrals.

Immediate opportunities (details for each are down below):

• Enterprise Project Manager
• Network Administrator
• System Administrator
• Business Analyst
• Java/J2EE Developer

StarPound provides an on-demand, open-source platform for enabling large enterprise customers to design, deliver and adapt communication-enabled business processes. Additionally, we provide an entire PBX and call center suite built on top of our core platform.

Successful candidates must be comfortable wearing a lot of hats in a fast-growth, emerging startup company (venture-backed).  And, they must be passionate about your job, and willing to do whatever it takes to be successful.  If you are interested, please visit our website (www.starpound.net) or contact Dottie Thornton via email with your resume (dthornton at starpoundtech.com).

Enterprise Project Manager

Requirements:

• Project reporting, monitoring, and milestone success on complex enterprise projects
• Experience within contact center, CRM, telecommunication services, or e-business industries is desirable
• Experience with web services, web integration is a plus
• Leadership and mentoring experience.
• Minimum 7 years relevant project management experience required.
• Excellent communication, presentation and interpersonal skills.
• Strong organizational and time management skills.
• Project Management professional (PMP) Certification a plus
• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent Project Management work experience

Network Administrator

Requirements:

• 3+ years of professional experience in networking field
• One or more of the following industry recognized certifications (or equivalent experience)
  • Cisco CCIE (R/S, SP, Security, Voice, Storage)
  • Cisco CCNP, CCIP, CCDP, CCSP, CCVP
  • Juniper JNCIE (M/T, ER)
  • Juniper JNCIP-MT, JNCIS-M/T, JNCIS-ER, JNCIS-FWV
  • Foundry FNCNE, FNCNP
  • ISC2 CISSP
• Deep Expertise in at least one of the following areas:
  • Data Center Network Architectures and Design
  • OSPF, BGP, MPLS, QoS
• Highly Desirable Skills:
  • Advanced understanding of IP/MPLS communications theory, design and functionality – Advanced understanding of VoIP technologies, such as H.323 & SIP
  • Experience designing and implementing QoS standards and technologies across platforms to ensure strict service guarantees (SLAs) for Voice and Video.
  • Strong working knowledge of network management and testing tools (at a minimum ethereal/wireshark)

System Administrator

Requirements:

• 3+ years of experience required
• Linux, MySQL, load balancing routers
• Asterisk, shell scripts, cron
• Distributed architectures, Fault tolerant clustering
• SIP, telephony experience a plus
• Performance tuning

Business Analyst

Requirements:

• Experience within contact center, CRM, financial services, or e-business industries is desirable
• Minimum 3-5 years relevant experience required.
• Excellent communication, presentation and interpersonal skills.
• Strong organizational and time management skills.
• Experience with CRM systems and processes is desirable.
• Experience with process modeling tools is desirable.
• Must have strong experience with J2EE Middleware
• At least a basic understanding of BPMN

Java/J2EE Developer

Requirements:

• 3+ years of experience required
• JBoss, MySQL, JSF, Struts, Linux
• GWT, WSDL, XML, Eclipse plugin development
• Asterisk, VoIP, SIP, PBX, ACD, IVR, CTI
• VoiceXML, UML, BPMN, Model-driven development

Cheers.

First, if  you aren’t familiar with Asterisk, it is the leading open-source software PBX and telephony package out in the marketplace.  They’ve done a remarkable job in creating something of enormous value.  I will go so far as to say I think Asterisk has quickly become an integral part of the open source enterprise stack.  Asterisk was created by Mark Spencer of Digium fame.

Asterisk is a telephony engine and toolkit.  Meaning you can use it as the underpinning of lots of really cool telephony apps.  You can use it as a PBX, a gateway, a media server, and even in call center contexts.

StarPound, while also an engine and toolkit, builds on top of toolkits like Asterisk.  StarPound consists of a visual business process modeling tool, and a suite of application servers that allow you to automate those processes.  For those processes that need to be “communication-enabled” (see: CEBP at Wikipedia), StarPound’s platform has telephony-related tools that tie into components at the Asterisk level.

StarPound relies upon external telephony engines like Asterisk to provide under-the-hood call control and media serving functionality.  Note:  We’ve done in-house integration and testing of FreeSwitch, and will be rolling out production support for that platform soon.

On top of all of these components, we have developed a suite of enterprise applications specifically aimed at call centers and enterprise PBX users.  These applications are incredible on their own merit, but also serve as great examples of the types of applications that can be built with the StarPound platform.  A lot of the confusion comes from people who equate StarPound as a “PBX in the cloud” company solely.  They think “PBX in the cloud”, and then immediately think Asterisk.

Even though we have a cloud-based PBX application, we typically don’t host it for individual companies.  That isn’t our model – that is the model of Vocalocity and others.  We are the type of company that powers another company that wants to be in that space.  We’ll have some big announcements to make soon on that …

So the short answer is, we are built on top of telephony toolkits like Asterisk and FreeSwitch, but that is really only a small portion of our overall capabilities.  StarPound is more accurately described as a software platform that automates business processes by turning them into web and voice services.  In fact, our PBX and call center applications are driven by, guess what?  Business process models automated through StarPound!  If you want to change something in your PBX or call center, you don’t fiddle with config files – you visually edit the “way” the application is supposed to work – the process model.

A great way to describe it  … with StarPound, you model what an application is supposed to do, not necessarily how it is supposed to do it.

Cheers.

I will preface this by saying that no matter how many times you’ve launched stuff, you will learn something new each time.  Embrace it!

The Launch Date

Putting a flag in the ground and declaring the date to the whole team is a big motivator, but it can be risky. But just do it. You can’t hit a date unless you first have a date to hit.  And your team has to have input and buy-off on that date.  It should be a stretch goal, otherwise, it is meaningless.

“You can’t hit a date unless you first have a date to hit.”

If your engineers are telling you it will take 60 days, set an internal date of 45 days.  Get everyone motivated to hit that date.  If you are excited about things, they will, in turn, get excited about those things and will become superhuman during the last two weeks leading up to the launch.

But be careful about publishing your engineering date to the market … :)  You really need to know your engineering capabilities and what pitfalls might crop up ahead of the launch – otherwise, you could be setting yourself up for embarrassment.

And of course, don’t commit the whole team to a date and be “that guy” (or gal) that does’t do anything to  help them get there.  Which leads me into …

Don’t be Afraid to Get your Hands Dirty

If your the type of leader that likes to sit back and delegate, you shouldn’t have left your nice job at Bellsouth (unless you had no choice, of course).  Funny thing about people – they respond very well by being lead from the front, and not the rear.

Back when I was in the Army (under Reagan – sheesh I’m getting old) there was this one Lieutenant that all the guys wanted to serve under.  Young guy – green as hell – but he got his hands dirty.  He wasn’t above pitching in to get the job done.  Whatever it took.

When I arrived in Germany to my line unit in 1987, my new platoon sergeant has to break me in, so he dogged me and made me serve motor pool duty for a week – in the cold rain – scrubbing a whole fleet of original 105MM M1 tanks that were covered in mud (they had just come back from a big field exercise).  While the more veteran guys walked by me hazing me for being a new recruit, this Lieutenant walks up and asked me what I was doing. I told him.  He took his parka off, rolled up his sleeves and helped me wash every single tank on the line.  Most of the other officers were lame in comparison.  This guy gave a sh*t about his team, and we responded in kind.  We would have walked through the fire for that guy – and some of us did.

In any startup, people are expected to wear multiple hats, each and every day.

Our bizdev guy jockeying for the top spot. FAIL! :)

Delegation is a fine skill to have, but you have to earn the right to use it, and you earn that right by leading from the front, not the rear.

If someone has a problem with that, you need to get rid of them – period – because they will kill you in the end, one way or another.  I recall one day a few weeks ago where my schedule roughly consisted of the following tasks:

• Morning status meeting with the whole team


• Writing PHP code for our new web site


• Biz Dev: meeting with a new Fortune 500 customer


• Meeting with potential investor


• Using Photoshop to create new buttons for our app


• Market research – then working on marketing packets


• Interview new sales guy

And this was just my schedule.  Other people had it much worse.  If you cannot willingly wear multiple hats, or  you don’t have the skills needed to wear multiple hats, you have already made your journey that much more difficult. If you really don’t have the skills to help out in other areas, make an effort to learn.  It’ll make you a better leader in so many ways.

In short – delegation is a fine skill to have, but you have to earn the right to use it, and you earn that right by leading from the front, not the rear.

Sales and Business Development

Don’t ignore the sales effort while you are prepping for the launch. You don’t want to wake up with a nice launch, and no one to show it to. If you aren’t balancing sales and business development calls with launch-related stuff, you are heading down a very slippery slope.  The technology dead pool is full of companies that blew their wad on great launches, but they ended up mostly being “all hat and no cattle.”

At the same time, don’t distract your engineers with too much sales support – they need to stay focused on the task at hand, which is getting product to market.  if you do need to tap your engineers for sales support, try to streamline their involvement as much as possible.  Do you really need to drag your whole development team into a pre-sales meeting?  How about just the CTO?  Another approach is to set aside a certain block of time each week that they can be available for sales support, rather than ad hoc’ing everything.

Patience.

People will miss things, so accept it now – certain tasks, even critical ones, can get lost in the noise. You’ve gotta stay on top of everything and everyone.  And guess what, you will miss things, too.  Get over it.

Your team’s level of motivation and attention to detail is going to have a fairly direct correlation to your ability to keep things moving forward, despite the cyclone spinning around you.

The 90% Solution

This is something I’ve espoused for a long time, and it is rarely more fitting than when you are trying to launch something new.  The 100% solution is never attainable – so forget about.  Strive for 90% and try to get that part right. The rest will come in time.

If you had a splitting migraine, would you pay someone for a pill that solved 90% of your pain, or are you willing to suffer in misery while they work on the pill that solves it all?

Cheers.

Well, after four years of toiling, the StarPound project is finally seeing the light of day.  In the wee hours this morning, Wei Wang (CTO) and I published v1.1.0 RC1 of the open-source StarPound CORE platform to Sourceforge, and then published the new StarPound.net web site.  The team has been working nonstop over the past few months to make this launch date – we’re tired, but we made it.

You can read a lot more about the platform over on the site, but I’ll serve up a quick description of it here, and share a little bit about where we’re going.

StarPound CORE is a beautiful fusion of business process management (BPM), telephony (VoIP/SIP, PSTN/TDM, cellular, etc.), and web services (SOA).  What a mouthful.   In other words, the platform gives you an easy way to turn your organization’s business processes into web (or voice) services.  You can also use it to create any web service, not just those that are explicitly tied to some business process or telephony.

StarPound CORE is comprised of two key components: StarPound Studio and the StarPound Application Server.  StarPound Studio is a visual process modeling tool that is BPMN compliant (very cool), and built on top of the Eclipse IDE.  You create a visual model of what you want the voice/web service to do.  You can drag/drop really cool things like calls to external web services (e.g. Salesforce.com, Google, etc.), call control tasks, IVR tasks, etc.  Test it, then deploy it into the cloud on a StarPound App Server where it is ready to use.  The service can be initiated by a person, a phone call, an email, FAX, SMS, or web application request via SOAP or REST.

The platform is 100% Java/J2EE, but obviously you can invoke deployed StarPound services using whatever language you are using (via SOAP or REST calls).

There is a lot more to our vision than what I’ve described, but at its core (no pun intended), that’s what the platform does. You can read more about our vision here.

What’s even cooler than finally releasing the first release candidate of the platform is that we’ve also released two sample open-source applications that were built on top of the platform (StarPound PBX and StarPound Call Center).

StarPound PBX is a full-featured, free, open-source PBX that gives you pretty much all of the features you’d need out of a PBX for your office:

• Auto-attendant
• Voicemail (and web-based voicemail)
• Call menus
• Call hold
• Call forwarding
• Call routing
• Conference calling
• Hunt groups
• Unified messaging
• User directory
• Integrated voice response
• Call center support
• Web-based administration
• Open-source and free!

And, it is scalable because it is built on top of the StarPound platform.  Legally, I can’t mention any names, but one of the largest video game publishers in the world is now using StarPound PBX.  And why not? It kicks ass.

StarPound for Call Centers is also mega-cool. It provides mission critical functionality for call centers, like skills-based routing, automated call distribution (ACD), inbound/outbound, predictive dialing, workflow management, queue management, CTI integration, call recording/monitoring, screen pops, agent dashboard, supervisor dashboard, remote agent support, etc.  Again, free and open-source, and another really cool example of the types of apps you can build on top of StarPound CORE.

Right now we’ve got a ton of really exciting business and partnerships in the pipeline on the commercial side of things, and I’ll be writing some more about those things down the road as we work through them. But I can tell you that we are enjoying a tremendous push into the enterprise call center space, online marketplaces/exchanges, and scalable cloud services.

On a semi-related note, we’re also exploring opportunities to invest capital and resources in new startups that are in a position to take advantage of this new platform for creating disruptive applications within specific vertical markets.  More on this soon … but you can read the official particulars here.  We have a couple of deals that we’re already considering.

Now with all the cute cuddly launch comments out of the way, I’ll add this:  We have a long list of incumbent industry players that we’re going after, in multiple markets and sectors. And we’re coming fast and going for your jugular. Let the games begin.

Hats off to the whole StarPound dev team for this launch (Wei, Andrew, and the guys in St. Pete) – it has been a long time in the making, and I know that everyone is ecstatic right now about where we’re going with the company.  Good stuff …

Cheers.