IVR System: The Answer for Smaller, Greenfield Mobile Operators
June 30, 2011
By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor
A recent white paper titled “Virtualization: The Key to Providing Tier 1 Rating Functionality for Small and Greenfield Mobile Operators,” from Interact talks about how “real-time rating, customer care, voucher management, IVR, voice messaging, conferencing, and more can be reliably combined in a single platform.”
In the small-to-medium mobile communications market, carriers and operators need to package, promote, and deploy communication services based upon unique operational requirements, and do so with minimal investment, the paper says, adding that operators in smaller markets, especially new or “greenfield” operators, struggle to provide features and services that are commonplace in larger mobile markets.
Normally full-featured products are designed for a larger subscriber base, the paper’s authors say, adding that they include equipment and levels of redundancy in both hardware and software beyond the budget capabilities of smaller operators and MVNO’s.
Mobile operators do have options: They can get truly full-featured products at a greatly reduced cost, via virtualization.
As the paper shows, virtualization saves money, energy, and space, reduces the number of servers a mobile operator would require to support their operation and also on the total amount of energy needed to run the hardware and provide cooling.
One way it saves on costs and general hassle is because with virtualization in place, system administrators don’t support so many machines, which means your IT staff doesn’t have to mess around with basic maintenance and routine work, but can focus on actual administration tasks instead.
And since virtualization lets you perform updates or replace components with little to no down time, the costs of rolling out new enhancements and services are much lower.
As Interact officials say, their Interact Incorporated’s (News - Alert) VIP Multi-Media Platform delivers performance, scalability and efficiencies to media platform requirements with its voice and video application processing: “The VIP Media Platform supports voice and data processing tools such as Conferencing, Unified Messaging, and Voice Mail -- to name but a few. With VoiceXML (News - Alert) as VIP’s underlying standardized language, service providers can write their own applications.”
Basically, as the paper shows, virtualization, when combined with bundling of software and applications, is a good option for the needs of smaller mobile operators.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Juliana Kenny