Voxeo Corp, the Orlando, Florida-based IP telephony company behind the Tropo web-and-telephony cloud-based development platform is acquiring a smaller competitor, Teleku for an undisclosed amount of money. (To me it seems more like an acqu-hire than an acquisition.) With this acquisition, Voxeo has continued its M&A ways — last year it snapped up IMified and before that it acquired VocieObjects and Micromethod Technologies.
Voxeo’s Tropo, Teleku and Twilio are just some of the companies that are trying to gain market share in the business of providing cloud-based platforms for web developers to create voice and text based applications.
On its website, Tropo explains the rationale behind the acquisition: A simple API that worked with multiple web-telephony XML formats (VoiceXML, Twilio’s TwiML or its own PhoneML). The companies point out that the existing Tropo and Teleku applications will continue to run without modification of the combined solution.
Chris Matthieu, founder of Teleku will join Tropo as director of business development. In a comment left on our site earlier this year, Matthieu said that he had been able to swing many of Twilio developers to its platforms, mostly because of its ability to work with many different formats and platforms.
As a parting thought: I expect more consolidation in the web-based telephony market which is crowded with many small players right now, some with little traction with developers.
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