Bryant Downey, CTO at Cintech, cites consumers' high expectations as a primary force behind the demand for his company's IVR applications. "Consumers have invested in the technology - with cell phones, smart phones, text messaging, email and so on - and they expect the companies and organizations they have relationships with to take advantage of that technology as a portal, or gateway, to keep them up to date with events that are important to them."
Cintech's newest product, cNotify - an automated, multi-modal messaging application - was, in fact, developed to help some of Cintech's customers address demand for greater, more immediate awareness of events affecting their end-users and clients. "A number of our customers using our speech-enabled self-service platform began asking whether we could leverage the platform for outbound notifications," Downey recalls. "There was a real interest in being able to proactively communicate with consumers about events that are important to them - such as appointment reminders or notification of an order being shipped." With the help of PIKA AllOnHost software, which provides media processing on a host PC, Downey's team has successfully launched an exceptionally scalable, hosted notification product that its customers manage entirely over the web. Making The Software-Centric Choice
"From a scalability perspective, we wanted to build cNotify as entirely IP-centric," Downey explains. "We also wanted a system that was very supportable. We knew it needed to be a hosted application and we needed the reliability of a co-located environment. These requirements together led us to the conclusion that building the solution on traditional telephony cards may not be the best long-term solution." Specifically, Cintech wanted to avoid the days of time involved in upgrading or performing maintenance on co-located hardware. "AllOnHost works this way: I can replace a piece of equipment remotely. I remote connect to the server in the co-located facility, load our software in a couple of minutes, restart the server and the server immediately announces itself to the platform. I can bring a system back online in a matter of minutes." He continues, "With a telephony card, we'd have to rely on co-located facility staff to install the new equipment, configure it, hook up the telephony circuit, make sure the right drivers are installed – or we'd have to set it all up here first. Either way it would take days." With PIKA, Downey concluded he "was really able to simplify my management and improve growth potential by going with a host-based media processing solution." Finding A Vendor Up To The Challenge
Despite the success of the results, it was initially a challenge to find a suitable host-based telephony solution to design in, in large part because host processing is a relatively new technology, only recently enabled by increasingly powerful PC processors. "We started by looking for companies that had a depth of knowledge in the telephony world," says Downey. "We wanted a vendor with a reputation and staying power. Next, we wanted to work with a company that was willing to push the technology." Finally, Cintech, of course, wanted the technology at a good price point. Downey says that, "it became very apparent that PIKA was the company that had all those things together." Cintech is pleased with the decision to use a host-based media processing architecture, because, as Downey puts it, "From a scalability perspective, our ability to grow the capacity of this hosted solution and our ability to bring on additional capacity are both many times better than if we had gone with a board-based solution." Downey is also very happy with the decision to use PIKA for the voice-processing component. Not only is the PIKA software delivering high throughput, but exceptional service as well: "we've had a high level of access to PIKA for support." | 
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