Disruptive Telephony

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

As you all probably know and as I mentioned over on Voxeo's 'Voxeo Talks' blog, 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 Voxeo is sponsoring. In the 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 part of the intro:

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.)

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