February 19, 2004
SkunkWorks Australia today announced the implementation of Telco Perl in its renowned Whirlwind telephony toolkit at the Aculab Communications Exchange (ACE) in Hawaii.
Combined with the Linux-based telco-grade Whirlwind, Telco Perl brings the power, cost savings and flexibility of one of the world's most popular application programming languages to telecommunications resellers and systems integrators for the first time.
SkunkWorks Director of Sales & Marketing Bill Oborn said his company was spearheading the use of Telco Perl in preference to proprietary languages.
"Most telephony products use proprietary languages. When customers want new features they're caught in a continuous cycle of time delays and labor costs," Mr Oborn said.
"Using Telco Perl you can leverage from millions of Perl developers and download thousands of freely available Perl modules. There's no need to train staff in proprietary languages, just grab a Perl user off the street. The savings in time and money are enormous".
Perl has endless flexibility and communicates with a long list of legacy systems such as databases, communications gateways, and web servers, as well as providing reporting and graphics.
Systems integrators across the world have used Whirlwind to build and deploy telephony services. The product runs on Linux, uses Aculab telephony boards, and supports everything from play/record, fax, conference and text to speech, speech recognition, protocol conversion, ss7, and VoIP.
In one example of the speed and effectiveness of the Telco Perl environment, a new Whirlwind user faced the challenge to create a new database for a telco messaging customer overnight.
"At the last minute, the customer said he needed the messaging service to communicate with MySQL rather than PostgreSQL," Mr Oborn said. "He simply downloaded the MySQL Perl module, and within two hours had it running and tested. That's the power and flexibility of Telco Perl. Resellers and systems integrators can now take their products to market in less time and cost than their competitors."
Aculab Sales & Marketing Director Chris Gravett said that Telco Perl was the most exciting development in telephony since the advent of the PBX.
"Telco Perl paves the way for a new era in communications technology," Mr Gravett said. "It enables users to deploy new telephony services on Aculab boards in just a few hours, which gives our customers productivity gains and cost efficiencies."