Jonathan Kressaty

Ladies and gentlemen, the way you perceive a phone “system” is about to change. Today, Twilio is announcing OpenVBX, an unbelievably killer, deployable, web-based application that allows you to setup an unlimited number of phone call and SMS “flows”, allowing individuals and businesses to have an easy to use, manageable virtual phone system.

From the press release, “Like Google Voice has done for consumers, OpenVBX lets business users control when and how they are reached. It also provides a modern web user interface for managing voicemails, sending and receiving text messages and managing phone calls from the browser. Users can drag-and- drop custom business phone applications, such as automated attendants, menus, team dialing, and shared voicemail inboxes for their company phone numbers.”

I won’t get too into details, so please visit http://openvbx.org to learn all about it, but I will share a few things. I was first introduced to OpenVBX in March, and even when it was in a still-pretty-rough state, it was one of the most impressive apps I’ve ever seen. You could do nearly anything with a phone call – setup menus, prompts, voicemail with transcriptions and email/text notifications to recipients, and what you couldn’t do you could build with an extremely extensible applet and plugin architecture that requires minimal knowledge of PHP.

As of today, I have five applets/plugins available for OpenVBX that I’ve worked on in the last few months: a “scheduler” applet that lets you dictate a call or SMS flow based on the time of day, an applet called “curling” that will perform an HTTP GET request to any URL and say back the contents of the page to the caller, a “restart” applet that will send your flow back to the beginning, a “call log” plugin that shows all call activity for your entire Twilio account, and an “installer” plugin that lets you easily upload a zip file of a plugin so you can avoid using FTP in order to install new applets. All of these applets are very basic with minimal feature sets, and I’m excited to see them grow and be extended by the community. You can grab all of my applets on Github.

We’ve been using OpenVBX on and off at Ripstyles for a couple weeks now, and it’s been amazing. Being able to have a multi-thousand dollar phone system for pennies per call makes perfect business sense, and it’s honestly quite enjoyable to use.

The team at Twilio has done a phenomenal job on this product, and I’m humbled to be able to not only work with them on a more-than-regular basis, but also be able to call many of them personal friends. I strongly encourage you to check out OpenVBX, post a comment on their site, this site, Github, Get Satisfaction, or anywhere else- this is a product that needs talking about!