Voxeo Talks

So what are the steps of pushing your voice applications out “into the cloud”? Where do you begin?

As readers may sense by now, I have a fascination with network clouds (and cloud computing), and in the latest sign of that, I’ve kicked off a 4-part series over on the TMCnet IVR Community that we are sponsoring. In this first article in the series, titled
“Pushing IVR Into The Cloud, Part 1: Why Make The Move?“, I talk about why you might want to consider moving your voice application out into “the cloud”. Here’s the intro:

With the world of Voice over IP (VoIP) comes an incredible number of options for how we configure our voice systems. Telephony can now be massively distributed over large networks. Remote workers or agents can be easily linked in to the rest of the office system. And many options exist to connect your VoIP telecom system to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

In the midst of all of this is the challenge that application servers, such as those used for Interactive Voice Response (IVR), typically sit on a server somewhere in your network. And you need to make these application servers accessible to all the distributed parts of your network.

What if instead of running your IVR applications on a local server, you could run them “in the cloud?”

What if your IVR was out “in the network?” Accessible from all of your sites and from the PSTN? What if you could do this without adding to the load of your IT department?

In this four-part series, I’m going to explore what we are calling cloud computing and how you can push your IVR applications out into the network cloud. First, in this article, I’ll look at what cloud computing is and why people should think about it for IVR. Second, I’ll look at the security issues and what questions you need to be asking when considering a vendor for pushing your application into the cloud. After that I’ll discuss the key role that open standards play in allowing you to avoid vendor lock-in and I’ll conclude with steps you can take to make the move into the cloud.

The article continues on to talk about what cloud computing is, why you might consider it and why you might not consider it. Now the article focuses on “IVR” because… well.. it’s the IVR Community on TMCnet! However, you can pretty much go through that article and replace every instance of “IVR” with “voice application” or whatever term you want… the concept is the same.

As I note at the end, Part 2 will talk about the reliability/security aspects of pushing voice applications out into the cloud and the question: Can you trust the cloud to always be there for you?

Stay tuned for more… (and please feel free to let me know what you think as comments to this post.)

Technorati Tags:
applications, voice, voice applications, ivr, cloud, cloud computing, voxeo, voip

Tags: Applications, Cloud Computing, ivr, Voxeo

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