Video apps in the cloud

The advent of voice over IP research - one of a family of Internet technologies - has given organisations a wide range of telecommunications options from which to choose. For instance, 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 or rather than public telephone networks - to which VOIP networks can as well be linked.

The success of IVR has spawned new-generation IVVR innovation. 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.

The corporate perspective

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 to put it more exactly than relying on multilingual voice communications.

What's more, the imminent introduction of full-duplex IVVR research will give corporate systems a range of new abilities, just 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 components of the network. Nevertheless, as IVVR systems do not scale as willingly as IVR systems, to reach an equivalent number of recipients requires a significantly larger server farm and increased bandwidth allocations throughout the network - with in like manner 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 servers.

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

Today's burgeoning requirements for video can be better addressed via communications services in the cloud, which draw their resources from a pool of shared, hosted hardware.

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

The number of communication products

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

Time-to-market of new ideas is as well 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.

In addition to IVVR systems, solutions just as video portals, video clip sharing services and video conferencing can be furthermore 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 straightway-generation, high-performance IP multimedia subsystem networks characterised by stratospheric speeds of 1 000Mbps or faster.