Video applications in the cloud

The advent of voice over IP (VOIP) technology - one of a family of Internet technologies - has given organisations a wide range of telecommunications options from which to choose. For example, mobile workers can be linked to the corporate network no matter where they are in the world. They can receive e-mail, fax, SMS and voice messages via the Internet rather than public telephone networks - to which VOIP networks can also be linked.

Expect IVVR to move to the forefront in the war on phishing scams, identity theft and other fraudulent activities.

Martin May is regional director of Enterasys Networks.

One of the more important by-products of VOIP is interactive voice response (IVR) technology. This allows callers to interact with a company's database via a telephone keypad or by speech recognition, after which they can service their own inquiries by following the IVR dialogue. A boon to corporate call centres, IVR systems are now becoming widely adopted to control almost any function where the interface can be segmented into a series of simple interactions.

The success of IVR has spawned new-generation IVVR (interactive voice and video response) technology. Adding a video picture to an IVR system has given organisations the ability to conduct multimodal interaction with owners of cellular 3G smartphones and other devices equipped with video cameras.

From the corporate perspective, there are many benefits to IVVR. These include the ability to display a screen listing option for user selection. This speeds up the communication process as pictures convey information significantly faster than an audio description. Avatars and animation techniques can be used to simplify and convey information rather than relying on multilingual voice communications.

What's more, the imminent introduction of full-duplex IVVR technology will give corporate systems a range of new abilities, such as the capacity to read emotions and - more importantly for business users - identify callers using biometric tools, including iris scans. Expect IVVR to move to the forefront in the war on phishing scams, identity theft and other fraudulent activities.

Traditionally, servers used for IVR applications reside on the corporate network and are required to be accessed by all the distributed elements of the network. However, as IVVR systems do not scale as readily as IVR systems, to reach an equivalent number of recipients requires a significantly larger server farm and increased bandwidth allocations throughout the network - with correspondingly larger capital expenditure.

As the processing of video in real-time is a more expensive exercise than voice, so the actual number of concurrent calls possible will depend heavily on such key issues as resolution size, the bit rate of the video, and the power of the local (distributed) servers.

These and other concerns make a clear case for taking IVVR applications out of the corporate network and running them in the cloud, thus dramatically reducing the load on the IT department.

Today's burgeoning requirements for video (as well as voice, fax and data) can be better addressed via communications services in the cloud, which draw their resources from a pool of shared, hosted hardware.

Service providers ensure user control via an intelligent management layer that also allows additional IVVR resources to be transparently added to meet changing requirements. This is achieved 'on demand' without the need for capital outlay or costly server upgrades and maintenance.

This gives organisations the ability to cost-effectively handle seasonal spikes or occasional unplanned call volume increases, as they pay only for the capacity they use, when they need it.

The cloud-based model is also geared to giving customers immediate benefit from the latest technology updates. And service providers are keen to remain at technology's cutting-edge to encourage new customers to sign up.

IVVR cloud host companies are constantly increasing the number of communication products and services they deploy - the latest being new high-definition (HD) voice/video communications options.

Time-to-market of new ideas is also important for service providers. So, in order to develop and test innovative offerings and faster integrate third-party peripheral systems, many service providers now operate dedicated cloud-based development and testing networks to obviate the need for conventional test laboratories.

Here they are developing tomorrow's IVR/IVVR applications designed to present the most modern levels of customer self-service sophistication, including the delivery of appropriate interaction types based on a variety of factors, such as device type and user location.

For example, 'speech' would be the presented interface if the user is in motion - perhaps in a car - while video interaction would be offered if the caller is stationary.

In addition to IVVR systems, solutions such as video portals, video clip sharing services and video conferencing can be further developed this way across a broad range of network interfaces and media types.

Future developments will enable completely seamless migration from traditional public and private networks to next-generation, high-performance IP multimedia subsystem networks characterised by stratospheric speeds of 1 000Mbps or faster.