As reported last night, Motorola has sold its VoiceXML Gateway business to Voxeo for an undisclosed sum. The transaction transfers ownership of the VoxGateway brand, source code and about 7 VoiceXML-related patents from Motorola to Voxeo. This is a case of “non-disruptive” market consolidation brings the business structure that underlies VoxGateway into alignment with the organization that supports its developers and nurtures its development.

As part of the deal, Voxeo will turn around and license VoxGateway back to Motorola. In addition, a joint development relationship between Voxeo and Motorola will continue as Moto’s 7 patents are blended with 2 that Voxeo has been granted and integrated into Voxeo’s flagship speech application platform, Prophecy.

Licensing and support agreements with 12 or so other speech-processing platform providers who deploy VoxGateway on an OEM basis will also move to Voxeo. This move should cause no disruption, since Voxeo’s engineers have been fulfilling the technical support role for VoxGateway licensees since 2004.

Voxeo provides a good deal of context for the deal here. Although this story has a distinctly “inside baseball” feel to it, Voxeo’s acquisition of Motorola’s VoiceXML Gateway business signals more stability for the Recombinant Telephony community. Even though Motorola and its engineers took leadership in defining the standard speech-enabled scripting language that became VoiceXML (back at the turn of the century), it’s go-go years went the way of the Razr.

The speech-based self-service community has witnessed tremendous change since AT&T, IBM, Lucent and Motorola founded the VoiceXML Forum in 1999 to pound out a specification for a standard scripting language to support development of voice dialogues. By 2000, VoiceXML 0.9 was turned over to World Wide Web Consortium (3WC) where it was refined, reviewed and later released as VoiceXML 1.0.

Voxeo first licensed VoxGateway in 2002 as the basis for the Prophecy platform. The current version, Prophecy 9, reflects seven years of refinement under a “shared development agreement.” By 2004, when VoiceXML 2.0 had reached the “Recommendation” stage in the W3C, both VoxGateway and Prophecy were compliant, but Voxeo had embedded a number of bells-and-whistles such MRCP (the Media Resource Control Protocol) and ccXML (call control XML) and support of “native” SIP to enable broader implementation of VoiceXML in multi-media environments and script-based routing. Unlike “pure” VoxGateway code, Prophecy is also VoiceXML 2.1 compliant.

Voxeo looks forward to making these enhancements available to the installed base of companies deploying VoxGateway on an OEM basis, including Motorola, with the introduction of its first Android-based phones, is starting to make a bonafide transition to the world of “open” operating environments and Java-based “virtual machines”. In this respect the OpenVXI code (now under the auspices of Commetrex under the brandname Bladeware VXI) is the only direct competitor.

The transaction “let’s Moto be Moto” and focus on manufacturing handsets, the CLIQ, that support its new user experience – Motoblur. Meanwhile, Voxeo is fulfilling its role as a dedicated supporter of a developer community deploying standards based resources in its cloud.

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