How Voxbone Dealt with API Changes and Seamless Developers’ Transition

This guest article was written by Sacha Nacar, Developer Community Manager @ Voxbone.

Voxbone is a cloud communications (IaaS) company based in Belgium with offices in Brussels, London (United Kingdom), Los Angeles and San Francisco (California). Voxbone enables telephony applications such as conferencing and contact centers to receive phone calls, text messages and faxes by providing inbound phone numbers in 50+ countries. These SIP trunking services are backed by a private IP network that interconnects with local phone networks in the countries where Voxbone operates. The company also offers value-added services like a WebRTC to SIP gateway, a product provisioning and configuration API and a dedicated API to send and receive SMS.

Voxbone API

The API that is currently using the APIMatic SDK generation tool is our provisioning and configuration API : VoxAPI-V3. VoxAPI-V3 is a web service supporting both SOAP and REST access, that allows customers to integrate number ordering and configuration functions with any of their front or back-office applications. Our customers can automate all the ordering and configuration of phone numbers and channels through the use of approximately 50 endpoints grouped in 5 separate modules: Inventory, Call Detail Records, Ordering, Regulation, Configuration.

Improving developer experience with SDKs

SDKs help our users integrate easily with our API, by taking care of the nuts and bolts of the API integration they let users focus completely on the integration of features without being distracted by purely technical issues. Furthermore, providing carefully crafted and up-to-date libraries to our customers helps them in keeping up with the new releases of our API. SDKs become especially important for versioning and migration as customers are able to get up and running quickly with any new release. They make the whole migration process go much smoother.

Automating the generation of SDKs is a very cost-efficient way to provide support for the most popular programming languages, especially since we do not necessarily have in-house experts in each of these languages. By promoting the use of our SDKs, we are also able to track users with user-agent headers and provide better support with customised error messages within the libraries.

Seamless transition of developers to the new Voxbone API

APIMatic has enabled us to heavily reduce the maintenance time needed to keep our SDKs up to date and to automate the workflow from our API codebase to the customers’ applications. Incidentally, this all came at a perfect time as we only recently released the newest version of our provisioning Voxbone API (VoxAPI-V3), and we needed all the help we could get to assist our customers in the transition from the previous API version. With SDKs available at the click of a button, we were able to help most of our customers transition seamlessly to the new API version well ahead of schedule.

We thoroughly recommend APIMatic

Overall, APIMatic has been very intuitive to use and easy to implement in our workflow. We appreciate working with the APIMatic team as they are very agile and listen carefully to feature requests and bug fixes. Their time-to-fix or support response is almost instantaneous and clear which makes working with them feel like working with an in-house development team.