Skip to main content

Taking Cloud telephony main stream in India

When we first launched KooKoo at Unpluggd, there were no cloud telephony companies in India. We knew that it would be an uphill battle as we would have to almost create a market. But we believed in the potential as the business communication market was untapped in India. We believed that cloud telephony could close that gap by providing easy to use tools for businesses to build their own communication channels. But we knew that business communications cannot be uniform. Each business would have their own need. Some would need innovative ways of reaching their customers(like missed calls), some would need a PBX kind of systems for their offices and some would need full featured call centers. So we decided to do both a platform play as well as a product play to provide communication solutions to businesses.

Platform:
We started off with a platform approach with KooKoo. We wanted to show the world what can be done. Innovation followed. Companies built new communication channels. Revenue started coming in. Very soon, KooKoo was powering the telephony channel for major companies. They were developing telephony applications with the same alacrity as developing web applications.

Products:

After the success of KooKoo, we decided to try our hand at a product play. We built two very specific business communication products, one for the PBX/EAPBX market and one for the call center market.

BizPhone pushed the PBX to the cloud. All the functionality of a PBX was now available for businesses on the cloud. They could visit the BizPhone website, sign up online, choose a phone number for their business and start receiving calls. BizPhone integrated email and became a unified communication product and was the first to introduce innovative communication tools like and Android app to provide caller detail pop ups, integration with Google analytics etc.

Cloudagent redefined what can be done with a call center on the cloud. This has truly replaced full fledged on premise call centers. Over 20 verticals have adopted Cloudagent and in some verticals it has even become a monopoly. Majority of food ordering, cab booking, online grocery shopping and bus ticket booking happens over  Cloudagent. Cloudagent has also become a standard for Ecommerce businesses to run their call center operations.

So, with this 3 pronged strategy, Ozonetel has been able to take cloud telephony main stream. More innovations are on the roadmap. Watch this space to be amazed :)

Photo courtesy: http://www.veganmainstream.com/taking-it-mainstream-commiting-to-activism-in-2011

Popular posts from this blog

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...

Telugu ASR speech data collection

Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures.  While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...

Google's approach to business communication

 Google has been making silent moves in the business communication space. Google has mostly lost the instant messaging wars. But it does not want to lose the business communication war. WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook have been making their own moves to enable businesses to reach their customers through their channels. Its all about who has control over the communication channels. Especially communication which leads to business. That's where the money is. Currently, Google is the king of search and most online transactions start with a Google search. FB, Amazon, Apple and others want to change that. They want the search to start on their properties. And they have started making the moves. WhatsApp business allows small businesses to conduct their transactions on WhatsApp. FB and Instagram have long supported small businesses to manage their business on their channels. Apple has also made some nice moves with Apple business chat. They have integrated a whole shopping expe...