Saying it’s figured out how to help vendors launch their own interactive voice response (IVR
) systems, an Orlando-based company today re-launched its own IVR and Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (SIP) hosting infrastructure as a new brandable “Platform-as-a-Service.”
Under the new program, customers will be able to OEM Voxeo’s IVR and SIP VoIP
platforms, providing the same proven platform Voxeo (News - Alert) has developed over the years, with their own branding. Voxeo officials say their IVR and SIP hosting service will help businesses save money by making those services more reliable and easier to manage, while enhancing brand awareness.
Jonathan Taylor, the company’s chief executive officer, said Voxeo naturally evolved as a major standards-based IVR and SIP
hosting provider from being the first to offer VoiceXML (News - Alert) hosting.
“Today, more than 400 global customers use Voxeo’s Prophecy Hosting to deliver IVR applications rapidly and profitably,” Taylor said. “With this announcement, we now provide our completely virtualized, multi-tenant IVR and SIP hosting infrastructure as an attractive OEM solution.”
Specifically, Voxeo officials say, the company has developed so-called “cloud-based” telephone platform services, which appear to customers as a single, virtualized IVR system with nearly unlimited volume potential. According to the company, the platform includes call control features to make, take, route and connect calls and voice media features that play, record, conference, recognize, and synthesize speech in a dozen different languages.
The company runs four hosting facilities across the United States and Europe that house more than 800 servers, company officials say, and each of those can process more than 200 phone calls at the same time. Voxeo officials say they’ll open a fifth hosting facility in Europe this year, and expect to launch more facilities in Asia and other markets in next year.
The hosted services are managed with Voxeo’s Web portal, according to the company. The portal includes Voxeo’s own visual telephony application development tool, “Voxeo Designer,” according to the company.
The company’s new IVR Platform-as-a-Service is designed to let end customers focus on growth instead of infrastructure, according to Voxeo officials. Adding the opportunity to OEM the platforms further adds to that focus, allowing customers to integrate the visual impact of their own branding to an easy to use IVR or SIP-based VoIP platform.
“Using the Voxeo-powered solution, companies can quickly develop, debug and deploy automated telephony applications on demand – without installing any hardware or software,” company officials say. “Virtual IVR resources are provisioned instantly and capacity is rapidly scaled up or down to address evolving business requirements.”
The idea of a virtualized, single and multi-site IVR technology is something Voxeo officials say they take seriously. The technology was patented by Voxeo eight years ago, according to the company, and it’s invested more than $50 million since then in delivering its IVR hosting network.
Michael Dinan is a TMCNet Editor. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users. Today’s featured white paper is Fixed Service Strategies for Mobile Network Operators, brought to you by Comverse (News - Alert). Voice over IP (VoIP) | X |
A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more |
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) | X |
A hardware- or software-based computer system that enables incoming callers to interact with voice prompts or verbal commands....more |
Internet Protocol (IP) | X |
IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
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Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) | X |
SIP is the real-time communication protocol for VoIP. SIP is a signaling protocol for Internet conferencing, telephony, presence, events notification (emergency calling) and instant messaging.
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