march 13, 2005
By Bec Tape, CommuniKate.
Published in The Sunday Mail March 13, 2005.
Being ten steps in front of its competitors is what makes telco software developer SkunkWorks Australia a company in high demand in a global telecommunications market worth $200 billion a year.
The small Technology Park Adelaide based business has developed the first and only complete telephony software toolkit written in 'C' language that brings open source into a telco-grade telephony system - Telco Perl.
The new technology, which took several years to research and develop, leverages from the widely used open source Perl language to provide unlimited flexibility at a fraction of the cost of competing products.
It enables service providers of all sizes to build and deploy new services quickly and easily without specialised training, and then enhance them without the typical technical limitations - a critical feature in the fast changing telecommunications market.
"Our competitors take months, if not years to do what we can do in a matter of weeks because of the advanced flexibility of Telco Perl," says Bill Oborn, Sales and Marketing Director of SkunkWorks Australia.
"We disrupt the market for telephony systems because unlike traditional systems that require continual development of new features, adding time delays and cost to the product, Telco Perl inherently supports practically any telephony function imaginable." Bill said.
"The future survival of the world's telecommunications service providers will no longer be based on cheap phone calls, but creating market differentiation by building new and innovative products, like those developed using the flexibility of Telco Perl."
The software was developed using 15 years' experience in the telecommunications industry by co-owners Bill Oborn and SkunkWork's Technology Director, Richard Clarke.
It controls the whole range of telephony functions such as playing messages, switching calls, checking a PIN from a database, sending a fax, creating synthetic speech, converting calls into voice over IP, enabling location based services, etc.
Telco Perl has already been adopted by carriers, service providers and government in Europe and Australia.
Since launching Telco Perl at the ITU Telecom World in Geneva in October 2003, SkunkWorks Australia has had an influx of enquiries and is currently seeking distribution partners in USA, Asia and Europe to support the demand.