Nick Ogden of busta.com Interview

Sunday, 24th September 2006

I telephoned Nick Ogden from Busta as soon as I had the chance to test out the Busta client. This is a perfect example of the type of "me different" product that we've been discussing at VoIP User for years. It's good to see the software vendors waking up.

These types of mash-up application for me represent the future of VoIP and, in particular, the Click to Call space. This is about integration and the amalgamation of different systems and products that we all use everyday.

This interview was conducted just prior to Om Malik reporting what we knew had been on the cards since the summer - Adobe pushing for Flash to be the leading embedded client for VoIP. I haven't yet had the chance to (officially) chat to Nick about Adobe's interest in this space and will follow up on that shortly.

One thing is for certain, Web 2.0 has thrown up all manner of widgets, wags and flakes that are set to compete with Flash for your browser real estate.

Note also what Nick has to say about the use of Busta within MySpace - these social networking sites are going to get voice-enabled whether they like it or not. The application that manages to secure that space is going to become a household brand name, much like Skype is becoming now.

In my opinion, the likely winner will be thin, fast and modular by design. Covering those three bases, at the moment, is just one player...

- - -

Dean: You started WorldPay in 1997. It's a big leap from there into VoIP. How did that happen?

Nick: World Pay just grew and grew. I had a great team of people running the business with me. In 2001 I went to Rome and ended up chatting with Bill Owens (former dept chairman of Teledesic). We were talking about the dot com bubble. Telcos at the time were scrambling to get into DSLAM technology. We knew that bandwidth was going to get cheaper and more available. We were thinking "what can you do with bandwidth that's the killer app for the internet? What makes it work?" We both felt that voice would be that application - it's the most natural form of communication. So we came back to World Pay and set up project group for testing some VoIP technology and looking at voice and data integration. I ended up selling World Pay to Royal Bank of Scotland in 2002 and as part of the deal I had agreed to 12 months gardening leave from payments processing, but anything else I was free to do with what I wanted, so the little VoIP project group became my centre focus and ultimately became Voice Commerce Group. Keith Martin and Andy Sullivan left World Pay some 12 months later and came on board.

Dean: How did that lead to the creation of Busta?

Nick: By end of 2003 we had our own p2p voice system up and running. We launched the B2B Instant On in the summer of 2004 and then went on to launch ON4, a consumer project (around about the same time that Skype was getting big). After listening to feedback from different people we ended up with a combo of business and consumer clients which became our platform known as "engage" - a complete "white label" instant setup triple play system. Whilst all that was going on we found some inherrent problems with the Microsoft Windows OS - we had to do some development to fix that up within this new platform. After that Busta was possible. A BETA "busta" was done in 2005. We knew we had always wanted to build Busta, but its actual development came out of the work we were doing with Microsoft in re-engineering some realtime applications in order to get them to work properly.

Dean: How hard was it to build Busta into such a small footprint (140kb)?

Nick: I was constantly telling our programmers "make it smaller, make it smaller!". By this stage we had customers in 204 countries, many of them on dial-up. This had to be quick and easy to use. It's actually a modular design - we have some other ActiveX things coming out soon and there's actually a "thin" version of Busta that's even smaller designed for the "click to call" space.

Dean: Several people have commented on how fast it is to connect - from dialling and hitting "send" to phone ringing is less than one second.

Nick: Isn't that how communication is meant to be?

Dean: Sure! In an ideal world. But it rarely is. What's the secret with your network? Are you on 100% proprietory systems or are you also using some standard software (SER etc)?

Nick: It's all custom written. At the time we started building it (2002/2003) there wasn't much pre-existing stuff around that we really wanted to use (that's changed now of course). So we built our network on Sun Solaris servers running our own SIP platform. I won't tell you to much about how it all works, but it's actually about to me made faster. Communication is about now, not in a minutes time. It's also about inter-operability. We think that VoIP is going to become globally interoperable whether people like it or not. So we started out with that in mind when we built our network and it's all based on open standards. If you don't do that then the walls just get torn down around you later and we didn't want that to happen. There's no point. We're also working on some inbound stuff. We've been using VoIP User numbers for inbound account testing(!), but I can't say too much about that just at the moment.

Dean: It also works really well behind NAT.

Nick: Again, we built our own proxy system. We only proxy about 3% of calls. Unlike Skype, you can block our network with a firewall. We didn't want to be considered a network admin nightmare.

Dean: You mentioned there's an even "thinner" Busta ActiveX Widget, presumably there is a click-to-call play in here somewhere?

Nick: We already provide click to call (well, actually "click and we'll call you back") applications to Cable and Wireless. We're working on Click to Call technologies which allow, for example, a businesss to download a desktop application that will "voice enable" their website. They can then have Click for a Callback or Click to Call, if the enduser has that capability. The thin Busta client is for that technology, to give that capability to anyone with a PC that has a soundcard. The problem with existing systems is the need to have a softphone client installed for it to work. If someone has been on a particular webpage for 10 seconds, for example, let's give them the opportunity to talk to us. I'm not talking about spammy pop-ups on webpages, but if the user agrees, the ActiveX, if PC is sound enabled, can be downloaded in a few seconds. Otherwise we do a call back.

Dean: What's the future for Busta?

Nick: People are already doing some cool things with it. It's being used on MySpace to create a means of voice comunication within users pages. People can click and leave voicemails, that kind of thing.

Dean: Any plans for a Firefox version? Mac? Pocket PC ?

Nick: FireFox is done - that's out next week. The Pocket PC version we hope to get out in about 3 weeks time. Apple Mac? On it's way.

- - -

My thanks to Nick for taking the time to talk to me. We also discussed some very very interesting and potentially ground-breaking developments that they're up to, but I've had to promise not to publish. For the moment...

Permalink | Posted by Dean @ 12:04pm on Sunday, 24th September 2006