News breaking from the Microsoft Professional Developers’ Conference in southern California let it be known that “Rich Phone Apps” (RPAs) developed by SpeechCycle can be deployed in Microsoft’s cloud computing environment, called Azure. At the conference Microsoft declared Azure to be generally available “in beta form” and acknowledged that, “for selective companies” it has been in service for several months. Come January 2010, the service will be broadly available for production use, and the next logical step, metered services, will start in February 2010.

Azure provides cloud-based instantiations of many core Microsoft server software and middleware. It is going head-to-head against other service clouds, including Web services-oriented API-driven offerings from Amazon, Google, IBM and Salesforce.com. In terms of middleware, Azure will feature an “AppFabric” that will include the resources and interfaces that coordinate interoperability between enterprise data centers and the Azure cloud. In the first half of 2010, Microsoft hopes to attract more developers and partners by introducing Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0, which will make it easier to weave cloud-based resources into enterprise applications. Both are currently in beta.

SpeechCycle’s will position the service as “RPA On Demand”. With its applications running in Azure’s cloud, the company will provide its customers and prospects a way to deploy its services without making major capital investments. Just as importantly, the company will find that its early entry into the Azure community will give it preferential position in the development tools commonly employed by members of the Microsoft Developer Community. It also provides a computing environment that can scale as needed when enterprises expand their phone-based customer care operations. This is a win-win for both SpeechCycle and Microsoft.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Microsoft, Recombinant Telephony, SpeechCycle, Cloud-based telephony