One of the major benefits to hosted IVR platforms is that they are (or should be) always updated with the latest software, hardware systems with fast processing power and most up-to-date speech recognition and text-to-speech engines.  Many businesses that consider whether to implement an onsite system or a hosted solution often overlook the benefit of always having access to the latest-greatest technology included as part of Plum’s hosted platform.

The Plum hosted platform will always support the latest VoiceXML tags and features as well as the best speech engines from industry leaders like Nuance.  In addition, Plum constantly updates all network and system hardware to ensure all the software required to process automated voice applications is running on the fastest, most efficient systems.  Also, we’re always adding additional capacity to our total hosted infrastructure so customers can manage large call spikes, place millions of outbound calls or augment their onsite Plum systems with disaster recovery capabilities via Plum’s three Class A data centers.

Companies that deploy premise-based IVR solutions can also receive the latest version of the Plum platform as part of their service contract; however, there is a cost to upgrading hardware and speech engines.  In addition, there is a cost to set up redundant infrastructure that can handle hardware or telco failures.  Multiple site redundancy is even more costly and difficult to support with premise-based solutions, especially considering that Plum’s hosted IVR platform is fully redundant between three sites and backed by a 24×7 uptime guarantee.

For more information about Plum’s hosted IVR setup, please visit our Why Host with Plum? page.