Automat Berlin - An Introduction

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Automat Berlin (//a) is a group of experienced software people who work in different areas of software development, automation, and operations for many years. We all met in our last project, immmr, where we have built and extended a virtual telecommunication carrier. During that time, we learned a lot regarding telephony, messaging, and video combining the best of the Internet with legacy Telco approaches. Whether it is VoIP, WebRTC, media codecs, infrastructures such as STUN/TURN, SBC, and media gateways, or SIP and IMS based solutions - we know what is out there. In particular, developing native applications on top of the stacks mentioned above is the craft we have learned during recent years.

As our name implies, Automat Berlin was founded in Berlin, Germany in January 2019. We make a living out of full-stack software development projects (our “factory mode”) and in the meantime contribute to the communication services community as much as possible from what we have learned working in the industry (our “workshop mode”).

//factory

When we work on //factory projects, we combine the experience of our Berlin-based team with longtime coding and operations partners in various countries to deliver according to our clients’ expectations. If there is no tech team yet on the client side, we start to build up an external team, begin delivering artifacts, and consult our clients on how to recruit and structure a delivery team to hand over all activities as soon as possible. At the moment, we mainly develop full-stack Javascript/Node.js and iOS software for our //factory clients covering all stages and components in the software development cycle. We have experience with Kubernetes for Docker on AWS, GCP, Azure, and OpenStack environments.

//workshop   

At Automat Berlin, we are convinced that communication increasingly happens in a context the user chooses to be relevant:

  • synchronous or asynchronous communication
  • a text or a recorded message
  • an audio or a video call
  • one-to-one or group communication
  • private chatting or calling the driver of your taxi app
  • a call from your bank to validate your identity or a code sent by SMS to authenticate an Internet account.

There are numerous situations in which a user chooses the best option. Especially younger users have almost forgotten the native dialer of their smartphone, or permanently mute their device.

Contextual communication features will less likely be embedded in Apple’s or Google’s mobile operating systems but instead integrated by product people and developers into their apps to enable a given context for meaningful communication scenarios. For many product owners and developers, it is still a challenge to include communication features efficiently into their applications. In our //workshop mode, we work on improving this situation.

Integrating a SIP stack or consuming CPaaS (Communication Platforms as a Service) providers like Twilio, Nexmo, Kandy, and many others, is still not trivial for application developers. Automat Berlin is developing software to integrate these infrastructures, stay independent from dominant players by offering an abstraction layer, and thus gain flexibility by replacing one by another or using more than one at the same time.

Stay tuned! We are going to post more in our blog and publish code at our GitHub account soon.