It seems that every tech industry, IVR included, is steadily moving towards a cloud-computing paradigm.

In their paper, “Cloud@Home: Toward a Volunteer Cloud,” scholars Salvatore Distefano and Antonio Puliafito describe cloud computing “as a promising paradigm capable of providing a flexible, dynamic, resilient and cost-effective infrastructure for both academic and business environments.”

In the IVR industry, most providers are offering cloud-based services. Some providers, in fact, offer only cloud-based services.

In their paper, however, Distefano and Puliafito wonder if the demand for the cloud and the complexity of these systems “could move us toward an oligarchy in which a few big companies control the entire computing-resources market.”

To avoid this, Distefano and Puliafito suggest a sort of sharing, or volunteer computing:

We propose an infrastructure that enables users, companies or communities already accessing the cloud to share their resources in solving complex problems…Volunteer computing harvests the idle time of internet-connected computers, widely distributed across the world, to run a very large and distributed application.

By turning the sleeping computer of the world into one, massive cloud computer bank, we could maximize the potential of the system and create massive open clouds with more processing power and upload speeds than ever before thought possible.