It’s starting to look like the DoJ might have some reason to look into why Google’s Voice app was barred from the iPhone. Today Avaya announced that its one-X Mobile client for the iPhone has been approved and is included in the i-Tunes App Store. A tweet from Avaya Support observes that the new client has many of the same features as Google Voice. The product description in the App Store stops a little bit short of full-frontal assault on Google Voice, but makes it clear that iPhone users who are employed by companies running the Avaya one-X application on enterprise servers can perform the sorts of call control, contact list management and voicemail management that they could do on robust deskphones.

What’s missing is Avaya’s recognition that Google Voice’s core value proposition comes with the close linking to contact lists, mail stores and applications embedded in Gmail and Google Apps, as well as the ease at which Google Voice enables users to toggle between voice, text and voice mail. Though not noted in the application description in the App Store, I learned that Avaya does support voicemail to text transcription through an agreement with SpinVox.

The App requires the 3.0 operating system and, as noted above, for one-X to be running enterprise-wide on the server side. That makes it a “private cloud” sort of phenomenon, rather than a generalized Web service. Still it is yet another initiative whereby an iPhone app can put more power over telephony functions into the hands of subscribers. But, especially in the wake of the long-awaited departure of Google CEO Eric Schmidt from Apple’s board of directors, we’ll watch with interest as the App Store selection group chooses among utilities that duplicate the native capabilities of the iPhone.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Recombinant Telephony, Avaya, Apple iPhone, speech-enabled mobile services, App Store