Carriers must differentiate on service and application delivery as competition increases in a rapidly changing global communications market. Increasingly, the dividing lines between telecom and wireless carriers, cable operators and internet companies are disappearing as convergence and multimedia gain traction. For over twenty years phone-based automation, routing and service enablement thrived among carriers as they relied on these interactive voice response (IVR)applications to service their growing subscriber base. These were mainly powered by proprietary (traditional) IVR systems. |