Aculab and SkunkWorks Form Alliance

MILTON KEYNES, ENGLAND - Aculab and SkunkWorks Australia have formed a strategic alliance. SkunkWorks will continue development and support for Whirlwind, an open standards telephony toolkit, and has already introduced many key enhancements. "The alliance between Aculab and SkunkWorks is great news," said Chris Gravett, sales and marketing director at Aculab. "It has enabled the enormous benefits of Whirlwind, together with Aculab's core technology, to be available to a wider market sooner than would have otherwise been possible." SkunkWorks embraced the core Whirlwind development when they saw a need for value added resellers (VARs). SkunkWorks believes in empowering VARs to deliver services to their customers on time and on budget. Whirlwind helps with the integration of hardware and software. "Our focus is to empower value added resellers and end users to deploy their telephony services in minutes," Richard Clarke, SkunkWorks technical director said. "Users can focus on application development without the need to worry about the lower level issues such as C level programming or resource management. Training and adoption of Whirlwind is simplified by the use of Telco Perl as the application development language of choice." Whirlwind supports Aculab technologies such as voice, fax, conference, TTS, and speech recognition. Interfaces include Database, SMS, ISDN, CAS, and VoIP. Other technologies continuing to evolve in the whirlwind engine include SS7, and application interfaces of VoiceXML and S.100.