Plivo - at Enterprise Connect 2013

Mike Lauricella from Plivo discusses how Plivo makes it easy for customers to build applications such as conferencing solutions leveraging WebRTC.

Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant. I'm at Enterprise Connect in Orlando, and I'm with Mike Lauricella with Plivo. Plivo is a relatively new company, so Mike, why don't you tell us about it?

Michael Lauricella: Thanks so much, Blair. Plivo is a fully open cloud communications platform. What we have done is taken all of that complex infrastructure that companies would normally have to buy, implement, rack and stack servers, and do all that complex work. We have taken that, and put it in our cloud. It is our job to ensure the scalability of that, ensure the quality of service. And then what we have also done is we have wrapped it up in a very simple API. So if you have a development team with whatever kind of language skills of their choice, whether it's Java, Ruby, PHB, what have you, they are going to be able to very quickly come to Plivo, sign up, and start building great applications.

What we're going to demo here today quickly is a conferencing solution leveraging WebRTC. We are going to bring a number of people together in a conference call. One of those people would be the browser on WebRTC. So I will dial in on that. The two others will be on a mobile. And we are going to show how all those calls are going. And since Plivo supports the concept of flows, we can do a really cool, innovative thing with conferencing and actually show who is talking. You will see that in the interface.

So we are going to go ahead and what I'm going to do is first, I'm going to dial in Blair here. I'm going to add her to a conference. And then Tim here from Penn State has been nice enough to answer Blair's phone when the call comes in. So it's going to be one more second by the time whoever the mobile provider is figures out who Blair is. You go ahead and just hit the green button there. Okay. And then you're going to hear a lady. So she is saying, "Welcome to the call and the conference call." And then that's going to stop and when it does, we're going to see how we look - who is here, that Blair's number, and Blair is the only person on the call so she is the only one talking right now.

And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to dial out to my mobile here. I'm going to add myself to the conference call. So this is the deaf side of the demo. It's going to take a second for the mobile to get alerted, but you will see that call come in from an 855 number, which is associated with the bridge.

Blair: And we're waiting.

Mike: And we're waiting. And the mobile network has found us. So I'm going to answer and you can see here in one second once he gets done talking, that I'm in the call as well. So that will appear here, probably about now. And now you can see who's talking here. So I'm talking now and if Tim started talking into the phone...

Tim: Hi, Mike; I'm here, too.

Mike: You see that now it's Blair's number that's showing her who's talking.

Blair: Better block my number...

Mike: Yeah, you're going to have to shade that out. So one more thing. Obviously, we're about the API, so we realize that this UI is a little rudimentary. But that's where we want great developers to come and build on Plivo and you make the great UI.

Then the last step is I'm going to join via WebRTC. I'm going to join the call. And then I'm going to be on that conference call here in one second. And it's going to say "you." Because the idea is this is my interface, and now I'm in the call. And if I start taking over, it's going to see that I'm talking and you can see that in the interface. And now it says me, since I'm taking over the mic. And then - so we got Tim talking. He took over. And then I'm going to take over the call.

The idea here is you would build a nice user interface. Or ideally, this would be a UI where it's got Blair's picture, Tim's picture, my picture, then a little box around that goes green. A lot of things can be done with that. And again, to do something like this to get started really costs you about a dollar. You buy a number, you put the app out on your app server and you interface back to Plivo and you're off and running. This is really just one of many, many things that could be done on Plivo. We'd love to work with more people to help them get up and running.

Blair: Okay, thank you.

Mike: Thank you, Blair.