Last Friday I had the opportunity to chat with Alec Saunders, CEO of iotum and talk about their fascinating new Relevance Engine technology.  I'd like to some highlights off our conversation with you, but first a side note.

Alec and I agreed ahead of time to use Skype to chat. While we had some initial issues with headsets and getting a full communications stream working, we quickly overcame that. After initially getting started via Skype, we realized with both have the latest SightSpeed solution as well. Since neither of us had used SightSpeed for a live conversation before, we decided to take it for a spin. I'll post my observations about SightSpeed in a future post, but Alec has done a nice writeup of some comparisons he did here. I think we were both quite pleased with our experience using SightSpeed.

Background on Alec (directly from the iotum web site)
With more than 20 years in software, including 9 years of distinguished service at Microsoft, Alec is absolutely passionate about how technology can affect the quality of our lives. A visionary who appreciates the materials, work and imagineering required to make it happen, Alec is driven by challenge – whether it's from his co-workers, industry pundits or nay-sayers. For all things Alec, check out his blog – http://saunderslog.com

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Framework
To put some framework around our interview, it's important to understand what iotum means be relevance and how they approach the issue. There's an outstanding video from the Demo event online at http://demo.com/demonstrators/demo2006/62991.html that shows a good glimpse into the basics of iotum's solution.

Here's what they say in a nutshell -

The iotum™ Relevance Engine™ is the world's first smart platform to intelligently filter, rank and prioritize calls based on their relevance to you.

Here's an overview from iotum's solution description:

The iotum™ Relevance Engine™
The iotum™ Relevance Engine™ is the world's first smart platform to intelligently filter, rank and prioritize calls based on their relevance to you.

The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. With the ever-rising influx of distractions, how can we stay focused on our priorities? How can we determine which communications are relevant to the task at hand? How can we be assured that important calls will always get through and find us?

Enter iotum, the world's first smart platform that solves the problem of communication overload. iotum prioritizes all voice communications so that busy professionals can talk to whom they want, when they want, and on the device they want – without changing the way they work or live.

By mapping inbound communications to work behaviour and priorities, IOTUM dramatically improves productivity by ensuring that inbound communications are relevant to the task at hand. IOTUM is simple for users to configure and seamlessly connects to their calendar and instant messaging (IM) tools to determine how specific calls should be handled - making filtering decisions based on who's calling, time of day, what is on the calendar, etc.

How It Works
The IOTUM service is based on the patent-pending IOTUM Relevance Engine™ – a network-based communications platform that understands who is calling and knows what to do with the call based on the user's preferences, priorities, behaviors, and other contextual information. IOTUM intelligently filters and routes calls - offering an enhanced user experience and enabling the quick deployment of innovative, value-added services.

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Ken: What software platforms integrate with iotum's Relevance engine? As we saw in the video from the Demo conference, you integrate with Outlook and MSN/Windows Messenger? I'm curious about Skype, Yahoo, AIM, and particulalry with corporate solutions, since many large enterprises deploy their own internal messaging services.

Alec: If you look at the stack diagram I can explain. The context engine, contextualizer is a plugin architecture. There are several different classes of plugin that can integrate with the engine. We haven’t built a wide variety of plugins, but that is the intent. We aren't aware of any reasons why a plugin could not be built to support any of these tools for monitoring a users presence status. At this time you can use any Microsoft Messenger product as they all use the same underyling framework.

Ken: How dependent is productive use on how I structure my contacts? In your Demo presentation you mentioned Outlook categories, but what if I don’t use categories quite that way? How granular can I be?

Alec: The system has some default categories that match up to commonly used schemes. There's a wizard for initial configuration. Categories can be customized in any way a user wants. It's really a matter of the initial setup followed by how much effort a user wishes to put into personalization of the capabilities. Some users are quite comfortable with some basic, wizard-based setup. Other users may want a highly customized working environment with a more granular handling of business and personal contacts

Ken: Where can traffic be pointed to? s it just for phone numbers? What if I wanted to point to a SIP URL in a VoIP environment?

Alec: Today our focus is being able to point at any telephone number. Our developers have been working on benig able to direct to a SIP URL as well. I think that may be implemented now, but not in wide use. Ideally we'll also be able to send to a Skype name.

Ken: What about more phones? Multiple cell phones for example, or people who have more than one office?

Alec: The wizard currently supports home, office and away(typically a mobile phone). The challenge is in figuring out which telephone to use. I can easily see support for 5-7 phones. Office, alternate office, home, more than on cell phone. These all make good sense. The performance bottleneck potential when moving to this level of complexity is around both the context engine and the rules processing engine. The concern I have is that each layer of complexity will require more user interaction to define how the user wants particular types of calls handled.

Ken: What hardware or software is needed? Do I need VoIP and a media gateway? What about traditional TDM PBX? Is this something I’d implement on a server in my corporate network? Is it a managed service offering?

Alec: We need to get into call path somehow. Today we use VoIP, specifically Asterisk, to accomplish that. We use Asterisk at iotum. We plan on releasing an Asetrisk custom version that anyone can pick up and use.Our focus on open source has been driven by the state of the technology and our current business. We're an eleven person company right now. Open source present a technology that we could pick up and run with.

We don't support the current TDM infrastructure of the traditional PBS environment. That's something to think about, but our need to get into the call path makes VoIP solutions the ideal fit because of the open protocols and interoperability. Our solution is really a Voice 2.0 solution, more focused on the VoIP future than the traditional telephony past.

There's absolutely nothing that precludes us from working with a company like Cisco, Nortel, Avaya or other major player in telecommunications. The issue for us is the overhead of developing partnering agreements. Working with those types of companies takes time, and our focus was in delivering a solution. I recently saw numbers indicating that there are  20.000 new installations of Asterisk each month.

Ken: How do you support different business types? Small home office (LLC)? SMB? Large enterprise?

Alec: Our focus for customers is really the small to mid-size business that's looking for a solution like Asterisk. We realized that's a target market that's nimble and open to new technologies. It's a market that is often not well server by the large telecommunications carriers and vendors.

Our primary target is not large enterprise business today. That's something that can come in the future as we achieve success and can integrate with the likes of Cisco, Nortel and Avaya. Today that reasoning is just based on where we see our best success and the size of our company. Anything's possible as we move forward. A large enterprise that deploys Asterisk as solution today would be a prime candidate and we'd love to work with them. We just see Asterisk being used in a smaller scale, but in very large numbers.

Ken: I noted mention of XML-RPC? Any pushback from customers who aren’t comfortable with remote procedure calls on the corporate network?

Alec: I've really seen two completely dfifferent sorts of feedback. For many people, it just isn't an issue at all. People who are looking for the power of presence relevance are pretty open

Others are very focused on SIP. Since this isn't SIP, some people are resistant. The issue is that our solution isn't restful. We require state information to actively monitor presence and provide the situational relevance to determine what to do with a call. Do we deliver it to the office? Home? Cell phone? Send to voice mail? These decisions can only be made based on the state of the user, which isn't restful. It's dynamic.

We could wrap the entire process in a SIP proxy if necessary in the future. We've talked about that and done some exploration.

Ken: What about extensibility to other evolutionary technologies? I’m thinking something like SightSpeed for video collaboration? Or Peerio based on my recent chat with Dmitry Goroshevsky. Do you use interface APIs or work with other solution APIs?

Alec: We use a plugin architecture. We don't use IETF standards track APIs. That process is slow and cumbersome. But we have published APIs and will continue to do so. It's our intent to be interopeable wirh just about everything via plugin architecture. 

Ken: Well you've certainly received a large volume of very favorable press lately. I'm curious given the obvious success you're finding, has there been interest from unexpected quarters - other innovative startup, or places you didn't anticipate the interest. I guess, the hot new buzzword this month is mashup. Any new surprising mashups with other companies on the horizon?

Alec:  I don't think we've seen any big mashups in the current sort of form. Nothing immediate. We have seen some definite from some market spaces we didn’t anticipate. We've had some queries and interest from some of the Fortune 500, I'd even say Fortune 50. Some of them are keenly interested in our conferenceing capability alone. There's been lots of interest. Some of their interests could lead us to a different path that isn't strictly our primary focus. I'm not sure we're ready to explore some of those ideas just yet.

Ken: With all the popularity and press, how do people see iotum's Relevance Engine in action? What conferences can people see iotum at ahead? Von? InterOP? VoIP 2.0 in October?

Alec: I actually have some family vacation planned , but Howard Thaw, our COO, will be at Spring VON in San Jose. We'll be at Von Canada as well. We try to participate in all of Jeff Pulver's conference and all of Rich Tehrani's. We'll definitely be at the VoIP 2.0 conference in San Diego next October. Interop might be a worthwhile opportunity, but we hadn't planned on it. That may be worth investigating. And we may be at the CTIA conference.

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Wrap-Up from Ken
As another resource, you may want to take a look at iotum's blog - Simply Relevant

First,  I had a great time chatting with Alec. He's got a very keen mind and understands a great deal of where the industry is heading, who his customers are, and some great insights in to how technology aids business. For me, talking with someone like Alec who's leading an innovative new solution onto the scene, insights to the future are every bit as important as the product we're looking at.

iotum's Relevance Engine is the first I've really seen of this technology type. Certainly it's the first to reach a market usable level of maturity. It's really quite impressive. It's a concept brought to fruition in its early evolution.

We hear lots of buzz about presence being the next hot issue. People talk about it all the time. But it isn't really "next". It's been an issue for years when you really understand it. Tools for mobile professionals have been advancing tremendously at solving half the problem. Let me explain...

I'm a mobile information professional. I travel and work just about everywhere. Work is not a state of location. It's a state of resources. Communications tools are critical to success. I do this with laptops, PDAs and telephones. I can use wired connections, dial-up connections, WiFi, and broadband wireless. That pretty much solves half the problem at best - I can get out. I can initiate work communications outbound in ways that I manage. It doesn't solve the problem of how I "open the door" to people who need to reach me.

If you need to reach me, you can email me (pick one of eleven email addresses, and I'll do something behind the scenes so it doesn't matter which one you use). You can instant message me if we're both on the same platform. I'm often on MSN and Skype, so people I talk to a lot know how to reach me. What if I'm on SightSpeed or Peerio, or some other platform? You can call me on the phone, but which phone? I carry two cell phones, have two office numbers in different locations, and there's my home phone too.

It isn't a new problem that I need to be able to intelligently direct incoming communications. Calls from family, friends, business contacts. Even calls from people I don't particularly want to call me. Some I may want to go directly to voice mail. Many I'll want directed to wherever I am at the moment. What struck me in chatting with Alec is how well iotum has taken the buzzword presence and shaped it to a more practical  use in defining relevance. Presence is meaningless without context, and iotum's view of relevance, puts presence in context.

For those of you who follow David Allen's approach to Getting Things Done, I'll offer a comparison. iotum does much with wrapping relevance around your present context like David Allen's technique to defining where you work on tasks. What really matters is what you can do where you are right now? What really matters is how the people who need to reach you can do so where you are right now. I've seen a lot of descriptions of iotum, but for me, they look like the GTD of presence management, and that's going to be huge.

As with every interview I do, any errors in this writeup are mine, and not due to any oversight or ommission on Alec's part.

I'd like to thank Andy Abramson for helping facilitate the opportunity to chat with Alec. Special thanks to Brooke Davidson at in Andy's office at Comunicano, Inc. for all her tireless efforts in coordinating the logistics. She's been a genuine pleasure to work with.  I anticipate some other interviews with some of Andy's other client partners in the near future. Coming soon will be Peter Csathy, CEO at SightSpeed.

If you find these interviews useful or helpful, or there's someone in particular (either an individual or a company) that you'd like to read or hear an interview with, please drop me a note.

For archival and reference purposes, a PDF copy of this interview write-up will also be available in the Realtime VoIP Community Reading Room.

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