October 2003
Source: www.speechtechmag.com
Aculab PLC and SkunkWorks Australia have formed a strategic alliance - creating a storm with Whirlwind.
SkunkWorks will continue development and support for Whirlwind, an open standards telephony toolkit, and has already introduced many key enhancements.
Chris Gravett, Sales and Marketing Director at Aculab said, "The alliance between Aculab and SkunkWorks is great news. It has enabled the enormous benefits of Whirlwind, together with Aculab's core technology to be available to a wider market sooner than would have otherwise been possible".
SkunkWorks embraced the core Whirlwind development when they saw a need for value added resellers to gain a competitive edge with a quick route to market for their solutions, whilst maintaining a competitive unit price. SkunkWorks believes in empowering resellers to deliver services to their customers on time and on budget.
Whirlwind eases the integration of hardware and software, lowering the cost of deployment.
Richard Clarke, SkunkWorks Technical Director said "Our focus is to empower value added resellers and end users to deploy their telephony services in minutes. Users can focus on application development without the need to worry about the lower level issues such as C level programming or resource management. Training and adoption of Whirlwind is simplified by the use of Telco Perl as the application development language of choice".
Integrating Telco Perl to Whirlwind has provided end users with virtually unlimited connectivity and flexibility. Telco Perl, combined with Whirlwind, allows users to create practically any unique service quickly and easily. Users do not have to worry about resource management, scalability, communicating with hardware or databases as this is all handled for them in the Whirlwind engine, and controlled from the Telco Perl interface. Telco Perl also leverages from the widely available Perl skills so that resellers avoid having to invest in expensive proprietary training.
Whirlwind supports Aculab technologies such as voice, fax, conference, TTS, and speech recognition. Interfaces include Database, SMS, ISDN, CAS, and VoIP. Other technologies continuing to evolve in the whirlwind engine include SS7, and application interfaces of VoiceXML and S.100.
For further information, please visit www.skunkworks.net.au.