Can IVR Scale?
Tourtellotte opines that the leading vendors of IVR solutions, while doing their best, find themselves in a tough spot. Doubly so. The current IVR systems are cumbersome for vendors to build, with programmers disappearing for weeks or months after the business requirements have been spec’d out. “All the legacy IVR vendors are trapped,” Tourtellotte says. “The IVRS industry is under phenomenal pressure. You can see major outages. They can’t scale. They’re going crazy. The scaling is the key.” Traditional IVR systems are also unpleasant for users at clinical sites, Tourtellotte says; clinical research associates don’t like punching in letters and numbers in a telephone keypad. Under the hood of many IVR systems, he insists, there is at least one more vulnerability. A different database schema is often used for every trial, meaning that it’s hard to leverage work from one trial to another. Tourtellotte started with a blank sheet of paper and figured out that perhaps 80 percent of the IVR
