The Need For A VoIP Application Environment

It's clear from a variety of early adopters' experiences that there are significant challenges in the development and management of converged voice and data applications, but it seems there should be better solutions. After all, pulling voice and enterprise applications and data together is not a new problem, is it?

Voice application development is not new, but developing converged IP voice applications that can transform business processes and empower employees throughout the enterprise is new and does create new requirements that must be addressed by the vendor community in order to enable enterprise users to leverage the promise of converged voice and data networks.

Inadequacy Of Legacy CTI Solutions

Computer telephony integration (CTI) represented the first significant attempt to get voice and data working together. Technology vendors used CTI to craft interactive voice response (IVR) and intelligent call routing (ICR) tools that were purpose-built for developing call center solutions — i.e. customer facing applications for handling in-bound calls. These solutions have proven to be problematic in two primary ways for use in developing more broadly targeted converged applications.

First, CTI itself in the form of the TAPI and JTAPI protocols is problematic. With a great deal of care and expertise, CTI can scale to accommodate a call center, but using CTI for a broadcast voice application to reach 10,000 employees or to enable secure, remote soft phone access for several thousand insurance agents is not feasible. Other lighter weight protocols make much more sense, and perhaps the protocol of choice varies among vendors and the version of each of their IP PBX products.

Second, because the legacy call center tools were purpose-built for solving call center problems, they offer functionality that is (appropriately) focused on call center requirements rather than the more generalized architecture and capability required to support applications used by all employees throughout an enterprise. For example, these tools are primarily crafted around developing IVR trees to handle inbound customer calls. They expose limited capabilities for additional media control (such as conferencing) and aren't flexible enough to develop more general-purpose voice applications (e.g. receive an SNMP trap, determine the owner of the troubled system from LDAP, initiate outbound calls to troubleshooters, conference all parties, and use text-to-speech to read error information). Finally, the majority of these tools are highly dependent on the call center infrastructure to operate.

The Metreos Solution

Unlike legacy CTI solutions that are inflexible, costly, and focused on the call center, Metreos designed its product suite from the ground up to meet the needs of enterprise-wide voice and enterprise application convergence. As a result, Metreos has delivered the industry's first and only complete communications application environment, enabling rapid development and automated management of applications that converge voice with enterprise applications and data, streamlining business processes for competitive advantage.

The Metreos solution includes several packaged voice applications; provides a visual IDE for rapid custom application development; abstracts the complexity of telephony protocols; protects the reliability of the PBX; supplies media processing such as conferencing, prompt processing, and speech recognition; and automates management of applications across the distributed worldwide IP telephony infrastructure.