XML vs. Telephony APIs
IVR, CTI, and Computer Telephony developers create applications
that combine telephone and computer systems. Historically,
these applications have been built with a wide variety of
telephony APIs, components, and script languages.
These include:
-
Dialogic R4 and GlobalCall - two popular, C-centric APIs that
work with Dialogic/Intel telephony cards.
-
TAPI and JTAPI - two abstract telephony APIs for Windows and
Java, currently supported by around 20% of the telephony market.
-
ECTF S.100 - a complex but comprehensive telephony API supported
by around 10% of the telephony market.
-
ActiveX Controls - such as Visual Voice and VBVoice that
simplify Dialogic and TAPI API development complexity.
-
Proprietary IVR languages - each unique to the IVR platform they
run on.
All of these telephony programming solutions suffer from three
common problems: None are widely adopted standards; all are
limited to a subset of platforms and operating systems; and all
were designed to requirements that pre-date modern web-based
solutions.
Over the last five years, the telephony industry has turned to
two XML and web based standards for telephony platforms:
VoiceXML and CCXML. VoiceXML and CCXML are industry standards
from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - the same successful
standards body that created HTML, XML, and HTTP.
VoiceXML defines a markup based standard for Interactive Voice
Response (IVR), including prompts, recording, touch-tone entry,
voice recognition, and text to speech; while CCXML markup
provides the foundation for call initiation, control, switching,
routing, conferencing, and call center integration.
VoiceXML and CCXML solutions run on an increasing variety of
IVR, CTI, and Computer Telephony servers, products, and boards.
Furthermore, because these standards are based on XML and HTTP,
they bring with them the immense power and value of web
technologies.
VoiceXML and CCXML based IVR, CTI, and Computer Telephony
solutions deliver 10 key advantages over their legacy
counterparts:
-
Portability
To date, over 300 vendors have pledged their support for the
VoiceXML and CCXML standards. This wide spread support
guarantees you the ability to create applications that will run
on a wide variety of platforms without vendor lock-in. In
addition, this diverse portability lets you derive a return on
telephony application investments beyond the lifespan of a
single IVR platform or vendor.
-
Flexibility
VoiceXML and CCXML telephony applications can be created in
Java, JSP, .NET, C, C#, C++, Visual Basic, Delphi, Oracle, Perl,
Python, PHP, Cold Fusion, JavaScript, VBScript, or any other web capable
programming language. Furthermore, VoiceXML and CCXML
applications can run on any web capable operating system, and
work with any telephony infrastructure including T1, ISDN, SS7,
and H.323 or SIP Voice over IP (VOIP).
-
Reliability
VoiceXML and CCXML application platforms leverage the web
industries' multi-billion dollar investment in reliability. IP
based load balancing, failover, and security from vendors such
as Cisco, F5, and CheckPoint can be re-used by your company to
deliver mission-critical telephony application reliability.
-
Scalability
VoiceXML and CCXML solutions separate call processing platforms
from application servers just as web solutions separate web
clients from web servers. This IP-based, client/server web
architecture scales far beyond the most extreme telephony
requirements. For example, telephony applications with
extremely large call volumes drive less than 10% of the
requests-per-second seen by large web sites.
-
Extensibility
VoiceXML and CCXML are both based on XML - the eXtensible Markup
Language. XML standards have built-in support for extendability
that can be leveraged by platform vendors, customers, and third
parties to deliver valuable, cutting-edge features and
technologies.
-
Ease of Integration
As web-based solutions, VoiceXML and CCXML solutions can
leverage existing enterprise investments in web integration.
Any back end server, mainframe, database, or system that has
been web or XML enabled can be rapidly integrated with VoiceXML
and CCXML applications.
-
Lower training costs
Because VoiceXML and CCXML solutions are based on the IP and web
technologies your company already knows, your developers,
engineers, and support staff can hit the ground running with
little or no additional training costs.
-
Lower capital costs
VoiceXML and CCXML applications can run on the same web
application servers as your existing web sites, obviating the
need for additional application server investments. In
addition, the split client/server architecture lets you deploy
telephony applications at your facility while outsourcing
telephony infrastructure, call processing, and redundancy
expense and headaches to a hosted VoiceXML and CCXML service
such as Voxeo's Prophecy IVR Hosting.
-
Lower support costs
Your staff's existing knowledge of web and IP-based platforms, the
ability to re-use existing web application servers, and the
ability to outsource call processing and telephony
infrastructure to providers like Voxeo all add up to reduced
support and maintenance costs for your company.
-
Faster time to market
Telephony applications can be designed and delivered by your
existing telephony or web developer teams and existing
resources. Using free, hosted developer infrastructure,
resources, and support on sites such as Voxeo's own
evolution.voxeo.com,
your VoiceXML and CCXML applications can go
from concept to customer faster than ever before. Or, you can
leverage the services of Voxeo's application development
partners.
XML based telephony solutions with VoiceXML and CCXML are
rapidly replacing legacy, proprietary IVR, CTI, and Computer
Telephony platforms and applications. This rapid adoption is
due in large part to the significant improvements in return on
investment, ease of use, versatility, and time to market only
XML based telephony can deliver. For more information on how
XML telephony can help your company delight callers and reduce
costs, please contact Voxeo via any of the methods listed below:
Learn more about:
For more information or to get a price quote:
|
 |
|
