Cloud telephony player Ozonetel foresees surge in telephony apps due to open APIs

Even though the phone is still the most preferred medium for both support and sales, most businesses do not have telephony applications that fully leverage the  potential of this medium. Ozonetel, a focused cloud communications player, is hoping to change this paradigm by giving developers the capability to easily develop telephony apps using existing web development skills. Using the concept of open APIs, the firm has sparked off a near revolution with more than 5000 developers registering on its platform to create innovative telephony apps.

In a detailed interview with Dataquest, CSN Murthy, Founder and CEO, Ozonetel, tells us the immense opportunity for telephony based APIs in India.

Some edited excerpts:

What is the potential and opportunity for telephony based APIs in a country like India?
Though we may not have the exact figures for India but research indicates that the global telecom networks API market will grow at a CAGR of 28 % between 2014 and 2019, eventually accounting for $ 146 Billion in global revenue by the end of 2019. In India, cloud telephony is getting increasingly more acceptance and with the result the telephony APIs are also showing exponential growth with businesses trying to build their custom apps for both telephony and mobile.

What is Ozonetel’s strategy to position its API to its customers?
Ozonetel’s Kookoo platform supports open APIs and we have over 5000 developers who have registered on this platform. We believe that this platform is the simplest and easiest way to build telecom applications IVRs, office PBX and outbound campaigns. The platform performs telephony functions, and it does not know anything about your application and it does not store your data. The ease of building apps using our APIs on KooKoo has made it a favorite in the developer community.

We blog regularly on what all can be done with KooKoo and how it can improve the communication for businesses. The blogs are followed by the developer community. We give free developer accounts for people to try our APIs. In addition, we have been hosting Hackathons on our platform in India and Singapore to get developers to try out our platform.

How many customers does Ozonetel have using its API – do name a few
As mentioned above, we have 5000 developers who are using our APIs to build various telephony apps. Some of the customers who we can name are Zomato, ZipDial, Grameen Foundation, Amura Tech, Practo, Monsanto, Doc Pulse, Sokrati, Housing.com etc.

Can you give us some examples of innovative applications built by Indian developers and the business need they fulfill?
Grameen Foundation together with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing a lot of work with the AIDS patients in the marginalized sections of the society. Grameen Foundation is supporting mobile health initiatives in India through their MOTECH Platform. At the core of the Motech platform, they have used KooKoo to build the apps that send out these reminders and alerts to the AIDs patients.  The Treatment Advice by Mobile Alerts (TAMA) program aims to increase treatment for HIV/AIDS patients by sending reminders and alerts to patients and their caregivers. BBC Media Action, CARE and the World Health Program are also collaborating to improve the delivery of maternal and neonatal health services in Bihar using their MOTECH platform.

NextDrop.org is another such social initiative that uses our platform to send SMS alerts to people about when the water is coming next.

IndiaMart is a marketplace for 5 million SMEs where basic listing is free. IndiaMart offers premium listing and premium paid services. They have a 200 seater distributed offline contact centre which helps its premium clients to market their services and also supports them stay online and to drive leads through their online presence The customer interaction is recorded and is registered in Indiamart's CRM along where the recordings are played used for client management purposes. Indian Money.com, a free financial advisory service which sells leads to financial services companies, has enabled a click to call feature in their system. Their entire lead management, quality audit and lead transition to vendors is done using cloud agent with their CRM.

Do you see a surge of innovation in telephony applications due to the Ozonetel platform?
Absolutely, as more and more customers are leaning towards cloud telephony, there is going to be a huge surge in innovation in telephony applications. Being on the cloud gives customers lot more flexibility with building customized applications. Since each customer has unique requirements, they can now have their own uniquely designed solutions with minimum developer efforts. The platform is built in such a way that it does not require extensive programming skills from the developers.

In an era of IoT, how can telephony developers take advantage of this platform?
The real time reporting that Ozonetel provides its customers can be used innovatively in this era of IoT. Largely, I would say that this will help in building more robust and responsive customer service apps across all verticals. For example, in verticals like healthcare, doctors could use patient history to make decisions on the go.