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.

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.