Parliant's Kevin Ford and CommuniGate tidbits

Today, I had thepleasure of speaking with Kevin Ford, the savvy behind , theOttawa-based maker of Phone Valet, the excellent telephony automation package for the Mac.  Kevin was veryaccomodating, and I really enjoyed our talk. He spoke with the passion of a creative engineer who truly understands thecustomers he serves.

I learned some great nuggets about the reasoning behind some of the design decisions inthe last version of PV that I looked at--version 3.  In my original review, I kind of panned PV's phone book asbeing sort of a sorry replacement for Apple's Address Book.  I took the liberty of directly comparing Ovolab'sPhlink to PV, since Phlink is heavily integrated with Address Book by default. I still prefer Phlink's approach, butnow I know a bit more about the thought process behind Phone Valet's address book, or lack thereof, as it were.
Kevin told me that Parliant had never really intended to compete with or replace any particular contactmanagement app, but wanted to be a "good neighbor" and allow users to integrate whatever CRM systems they hadat their disposal.  This make sense and will be taken into account in my next review of Kevin's software.
I also had an opportunity totalk with a VP at today. As you may know, CommuniGate is a vendorof high-end, Unix-based software for high-volume messaging applications. Now, CommuniGate is in the process of rampinga whole lot of SIP call-signaling capabilities into their platform, essentially transforming it into a true convergenceserver for service providers. He mentioned that there are many great developments still to come, including Ajax-basedfront-end goodies for subscriber-facing call-management apps. Cool, cool, cool.

Well, it's getting late.See you tomorrow, blogosphere.


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