As we mentioned in a previous post, telephony is hard.  As such, many IVR vendors often resell other company’s platforms or build their systems on top of open source platforms like Asterisk.  Companies select IVR vendors for their specialized expertise and make long term strategic investments in IVR technology.  They rely on their vendor to help program and support complex IVR solutions.  If a business outsources their hosted IVR solution to a provider who, in turn, outsources the core technology to another company, either via an OEM or reseller relationship, who is the real expert and what is a company really paying for?  If a vendor is just using another company’s technology and marking up the service, companies won’t have direct access to developers and support personnel.  This can result in slow support response times and misguided information about how to properly set up an IVR solution.

Plum has developed its VoiceXML platform in-house.  We control every aspect of the platform, including deep integration with telecommunication carriers, TTS and ASR engines, Plum’s SIP stack, and drivers that interconnect with TDM circuits.  The engineers that wrote the first line of code are still employed at Plum and our teams’ collective knowledge of IVR and VoiceXML makes us true experts.