An announcement just out of Honolulu brings word that, at the Aculab communications exchange (ACE) in Hawaii, the wonderfully named SkunkWorks Australia has implemented Telco Perl in its Whirlwind telephony toolkit.

"Combined with the Linux-based, telco-grade Whirlwind," says the official release, "Telco Perl brings the power, cost savings and flexibility of one of the world's most popular application programming languages to telecommunications resellers and systems integrators for the first time."

SkunkWorks is spearheading the use of Telco Perl - Perl has endless flexibility and communicates with a long list of legacy systems such as databases, communications gateways and Web servers, as well as providing reporting and graphics - in preference to the proprietary languages used by most telephony products.

"When customers want new features they're caught in a continuous cycle of time delays and labor costs," says Bill Oborn, the company's director of sales & marketing.

"Using Telco Perl," he continues, "you can leverage from millions of Perl developers and thousands of Perl modules you can download free. There's no need to train staff in proprietary languages, just grab a Perl user off the street. The savings in time and money are enormous."

According to Oborn, Systems integrators and resellers all over the world use Whirlwind to build and deploy telephony services.

"The product runs on Linux," he explains, "uses Aculab telephony boards and supports everything from play/record, fax, conference and text to speech to speech recognition, protocol conversion, ss7 and VoIP."

In one example of the innovative Telco Perl environment, Oborn describes how a Whirlwind distributor faced the challenge to create a new database for a telco messaging customer overnight.

"At the last minute," Oborn says, "the customer said he needed the messaging service to communicate with MySQL rather than PostgreSQL. He simply downloaded the PostgreSQL Perl module, and within two hours had it running and tested. That's the power and flexibility of Telco Perl. Resellers and systems integrators can now take their products to market in less time and cost than their competitors."

As if these superlatives were not enough in themselves, Chris Gravett - Aculab's sales & marketing director - said that Telco Perl "was the most exciting development in telephony since the advent of the PBX."

Follow that for an endorsement!

Further information:
http://wwww.skunkworks.net.au