A majority of businesses operating in the tech sector rely on the cloud to function.  Whether maintaining a hosted IVR solution, developing a mobile application or simply storing customer data offsite, the cloud plays an integral role in facilitating business processes for a multitude of companies.

Here at Plum, we offer companies a variety of IVR solutions tailored to fit their operational needs.  Increasingly, companies are choosing to host their IVR applications with us, which means that we design, build, deploy and maintain technology that is housed in the cloud.

These applications are housed in world-class data centers located around the U.S. and Europe, and are a great solution for any company, regardless of size, looking to implement an IVR solution specifically tailored to fulfill their business needs.

For clients that choose a hosted application (as opposed to an on-site IVR system), they are able to utilize Plum’s hosted IVR infrastructure that includes features like telco provisioning, port capacity, fault tolerance and disaster recovery.

Plum meticulously maintains our hosted IVR infrastructure and the applications built on it.  Using a cloud deployment model allows for the highest level of care centralized in one location.  Cloud computing is invaluable in executing and maintaining IVR operations, and we are only one of millions of companies that rely on the service to perform day-to-day business tasks.

This is simply one example out of hundreds for how cloud-computing services can be implemented.  But how does a company choose a provider?  And how are companies that were operational prior to the rise of the cloud becoming and staying competitive with this new model for service delivery?

These questions have come to the forefront of the cloud computing debate, due in part to statements Oracle’s chief executive Larry Ellison made during the company’s annual showcase.  When asked about his company’s approach to cloud computing, he detailed an “engineered systems” approach, which per the New York Times is “a merger of hardware and software that he argued enables faster performance and better security.”

Ellison is essentially arguing that clients that have and do utilize services from huge tech providers should continue to turn to these “incumbent tech providers” to fulfill their cloud computing needs.

This supposition sets up an interesting conflict for those who use or are thinking of using the cloud: stay loyal to the huge tech providers who have just recently entered the cloud arena, or explore offerings of newer companies who have built technology explicitly for the cloud and the cloud market.

Stay tuned for Experience or Innovation?…