A case study on IVR applications´ provisioning as cloud computing services

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications (e.g. automated attendant, automated survey) have become ubiquitous. However, very few, if any, IVR applications are provisioned today as cloud computing services despite all the potential benefits. Cloud computing is an emerging multi-faceted paradigm, whose main facets are Infrastructure as a Service-IaaS, Platform as a Service-PaaS, and Software as a Service-SaaS. This paper proposes a case study on IVR applications´ provisioning as cloud computing services. It identifies the IVR substrates (e.g. key detector, voice recorder and dialog manager) on which the IVR applications rely and proposes at the IaaS level an IVR substrate virtualization infrastructure. Substrates´ virtualization enables a more efficient resource usage, a key benefit inherent to cloud computing. The article also proposes at the PaaS level an accompanying platform to develop and manage the IVR applications which use the identified virtualized substrates. A few typical IVR applications are also developed and managed to illustrate the SaaS facet of cloud computing. The implementation is described, along with the prototype and the performance measurements.