“Build Innovative Voice Apps/Services on KooKoo, Cloud PaaS” - Ozonetel Founder-CEO Mr. Chintalapati

Mr. Murthy Chintalapati is the Founder and CEO of Hyderabad based Ozonetel Systems - a pioneer of Cloud Telephony technology in India.

Murthy Chintalapati, a serial technology entrepreneur is recognized by many Silicon Valley technopreneurs as someone who identifies industry pain points and builds successful business ventures that address the market need. Murthy started his first venture Intoto, in 1997 in SanJose, California.

• With talk of double-dip recession looming ahead for major global economies, how relevant is the talk of Cloud Computing implementation in India specifically for SMBs/SMEs?

Cloud computing which has the key benefits of minimum capex (read zero CAPEX) and usage based on demand scaling and billing will help business in these challenging times. The SMB/SME segment will learn to better streamline their IT spending and minimize technology risk by using the high end services of cloud computing providers.

Coming to Cloud telephony services, the need has not been met at all and this is a new market being created. Read more on cloud telephony in an article by our principal architect, Chaitanya on cloudstory.in.

• Your flagship offering KooKoo, is a telephony in cloud. How is it different from traditional telephony? Does the KooKoo platform has all 5 essential attributes of a Cloud Service as defined by NIST?

Yes we comply with all five, with little deviation because of the current regulation in India. KooKoo is a platform as a service (PaaS) option available to developers to build innovative voice applications either for their existing business or to create a new business.

• Though relatively new your cloud platform KooKoo is getting a significant attention as a Twilio equivalent for India. What’s your USP?

Broadly KooKoo is platfrom as a service (PaaS) and offer similar services as Twilio, but actually our approach is completely different. While Twilio has exposed its platform services only, KooKoo has taken a ecosystem approach, where other platform services from our partners are exposed as part of the KooKoo API, making it a complete versatile platform for users to think, build, roll out and scale on the platform. For example, we are integrating Text to Speech, Payment gateways, SMS options and so on, on the platform creating a strong ecosystem for our customers.

• Are you providing SMS services as well?

As stated earlier, SMS services are from our partners, but are accessible as KooKoo API. Users don’t have to do multiple vendor sign ups; a user signs with KooKoo and we take care of it all in the back-end.

• Is there any geographical limitation for KooKoo?

Currently we are present in India servicing 10 different locations, and will be soon launching in other countries. Since this is telecom that needs access to local telco, it needs to have a physical presence where we want to launch our services. The local phone lines have to be linked to a server for the call logic to work and hence we are expanding our geographical presence across India.

• What are the top 3 verticals that must act with a strategy to get early bird advantage of cloud telephony services in India?

The verticals where we have seen good traction are:

1. Retail (eCommerce).
2. NGO.
3. Travel.

• Can I migrate/host an application developed on KooKoo to another IaaS apart from Ozonetel’s own data-centers? [Vendor-lock-in issue]

KooKoo is a PaaS, we don’t host applications. Applications are built using KooKoo API (Application Programming Interface), using the user’s choice of web application language (PHP, Java, Python etc). API calls can be replaced with another set of API. So migration to other PaaS vendors is possible.

• With ever increasing tele-density (mobile, telephone) in India, once you hit the tipping point; your peak call volume will increase manifold. How scalable is your infrastructure?

The platform is designed so that different entities can scale as per business requirements and hence the concept of peak call volume is local to each customer, thus being scalable to a large extent.

• Recently KooKoo and Gharpay Partnered for Offline IVR payments. Looks like a good combo to address a potential market of over 740 million voice users. What’s your take on this alliance?

That is part of our ecosystem approach, there are lot of innovative services available which together with KooKoo can provide users the capability to build fantastic end to end solutions. Similarly we have tied up with Akshar Speech to offer Hindi, Telugu and other local languages text to speech. We will be announcing many more such partnerships.

• Apart from KooKoo, what are other services offered by Ozonetel Systems?

You can check the following Cloud Services:

• CPBX (Cloud PBX – http://cpbx.in )
• CloudAgent (Cloud Contact Center – http://cloudagent.in )

• Security-in-the-Cloud - is it really a big concern? How are you addressing this at KooKoo?

Yes it is, in our case we don’t host customer data. All KooKoo applications are built and hosted by users in their servers. This is less applicable in our kind of services

• You are a well-known serial entrepreneur. Can you share the most important lesson learned through your entrepreneurial journey of 15 years?

During the incubation phase of product business, having a services business line for bootstrapping always posed a challenge in terms of focus, operations management and handling HR issues. Managing the services but concentrating on the core product/platform development and balancing both the acts has been my biggest learning experience.

Thank you Mr. Murthy Chintalapati for sharing your views with Techno-Pulse readers. Good Luck to you and the  Ozonetel – KooKoo team in your future endeavors.

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