What is IVR in the Cloud?

If your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system has been deployed on premise for as long as anyone can remember, you’re probably wondering:

  1. Why is there so much buzz around “the Cloud”?
  2. How could IVR possibly be mentioned in the same sentence as the Cloud?

As it turns out much has changed in how IVR systems can be deployed, giving rise to a very cloud-like deployment option that is growing very popular among enterprises who traditionally have deployed on premise.

IVR in the Cloud, or as some call it, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a significant departure from fully outsourced managed IVR services of the past.  In the old days of proprietary IVR systems, there was no good way to cleanly separate an IVR application from the platform it ran on.  Your deployment options were basically all or nothing.  Either deploy the whole system on premise or hand it all over to a managed service provider.  Most enterprises were a little uncomfortable giving up control of their applications, so not surprisingly premise-based deployments held steady at 80%-90% of the market for over 20 years.

About 5 years ago, this began to change.  Widespread adoption of theVoiceXML standard has made an “IVR in the Cloud” deployment option practical.  In VoiceXML there is a clean separation between the IVR application and the platform that runs it.  In fact, the application and the platform can even be in different physical locations– and that is the pivotal change that has enabled IVR Platform-as-a-Service.

Simplified PaaS architecture

IVR in the Cloud lets you deploy your IVR applications on your own servers in your data center.  You maintain complete control over those applications- just as though they were part of a premise-based IVR system.  They can sit behind your firewall and interact with other applications and databases from inside your IT infrastructure.

The IVR platform (often called a Voice Browser or Voice Portal) sits in the Cloud, operated by a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider.  The PaaS provider charges you a fee to use the platform, and in return takes on the responsibility of operating the platform, ensuring uptime, managing capacity, and upgrading the platform over time.   You benefit from economies of scale because the PaaS provider can share its IVR platform and surrounding infrastructure across many end customers– thereby using its resources more efficiently than if they were dedicated to a single enterprise on premise.

In many ways IVR in the Cloud gives you the best of both worlds– you get full control over your applications on premise, and at the same time benefit from economies of scale through a shared platform and surrounding infrastructure.  This concept has taken root over the last 5 years and  is now a mainstream deployment option with broad appeal to enterprises who have traditionally deployed IVR on premise.