Interview with open source entrepreneur Jay Phillips

Note: I like the interview. It seems they developed a nice piece of technology to compliment Asterisk. I would like to try out there offering once it gets out of the private beta stage.

Jay Phillips is a young entrepreneur who doesn’t wait for success to find him, he goes out and makes it happen. He saw an opportunity in the VoIP sector and developed Adhearsion, an open-source framework that’s on the verge of revolutionizing the entire telephony industry.

Tell me about Adhearsion. How did you get it started and why?

Necessity is the mother of invention. While working with an Internet telephony service provider in Houston, I found a lot of dismal repetition in our day-to-day jobs, and when our boss would get crazy new ideas to integrate the phone systems with something new, we just squirmed in our seats. This wasn’t just an issue facing our little spot on the map– this was an issue affecting the entire industry.

Adhearsion came about as an experimental solution that my roommate Mike and I wrote in our free time. When the going started getting extremely good, we offered to sell the program to our boss (we were just contractors at the time) and legal issues ensued. We left the company and Codemecca was formed.

What exactly does Adhearsion do? What problems does it solve?

Well, the best way for fellow geeks to understand it is to explain that Adhearsion is a new Application Programmer Interface layer to an entire business, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) included. The open-source PBX software Asterisk by the fantastic folks at Digium has really revolutionized the Telecom world and it’s this on which Adhearsion builds.

What makes Adhearsion special is that it employs the linguistic, very high-level Ruby programming language, allows refreshingly pain-free database integration, and most importantly I feel is its extension architecture.

Until now actually trading and merging sophisticated VoIP functionality has been a nightmare. Now one file gets put in your Adhearsion folder, Adhearsion finds that file, and suddenly the code in that file works across the entire framework.

This has provisioned the potential for some really awesome features that will come standard with Adhearsion, making a new (and free!) Adhearsion install more powerful than what most companies have spent tens of thousands on.

Despite the fact Adhearsion is in a private beta phase right now, these features to which I’m vaguely referring have already created quite a bit of industry interest.

The best way for our fellow ungeeky better halves to understand Adhearsion is to say that Adhearsion makes programmers and managers really, really happy.

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