The use of a range of wireless, Internet-enabled portable computing devices has dramatically extended the reach of online services.

Nonetheless, complications such as wireless service gaps, time constraints, and hardware inconvenience can make contacting corporate enterprise systems while on the road difficult and inconvenient.

There is a broad spectrum of providers of online business and consumer services who furnish a range of offerings geared to "anytime, anywhere" access. These include many services that were designed and targeted to address the specific needs of mobile users, and users with travel-intensive businesses or lifestyles.

Convenience Is the Name of the Game
Online services provider Outtask furnishes corporate clients with Web-enabled, employee-facing travel, expense, and recruiting management software applications. Among its products, Outtask provides two successful Web-based travel and expense automation solutions - Cliqbook and Vinnet, respectively.

Because the two solutions are aimed at business people who are frequently on the move, Outtask realized that there was a significant Catch-22 to providing travel and expense services to traveling people: it is unreasonable to expect a client's employees to be wired to the Internet when they are riding in a cab or running through the airport.

Consequently, Outtask decided it could further extend those services - and provide a much-needed utility to customers - by finding a way to offer access to those business applications via a phone-based interactive voice response (IVR) system. Outtask set out to use the IVR platform to rapidly expand practical access to its outsourced applications to its clients' entire employee base.

Laying Out the Requirements
Outtask had a number of basic requirements in choosing a solution. First, to avoid an extended and disruptive deployment period, they would select a system without a steep learning curve. That meant the solution could not require Outtask to hire professional services or to engage in extensive IVR-specific training such as training in VoiceXML or speech recognition technology.

Second, because the move to IVR was intended to add functionality on top of existing services, the system must not require a heavy upfront investment. Outtask's natural inclination was to avoid the expense and risk of purchasing and maintaining the specialized hardware associated with many IVR solutions currently on the market.

And third, and perhaps most important, the new IVR system had to leverage Outtask's existing service-oriented architecture (SOA). With a significant investment in Web services, Outtask wanted an IVR solution that would fit in an elegant manner.

The Decision
Outtask's core expertise and skill set is around corporate travel and expense management, not in voice response systems. Outtask already had a substantial investment in its platform and was unwilling to bear the expense of building another core competence. Consequently, some platforms were eliminated from the possibilities because in order to interoperate with many of them, Outtask would have to entirely replicate its infrastructure and business logic - all just to add phone-based interfaces.

Outtask also ruled out solutions that created silo environments that failed to make efficient reuse of existing resources.

Finally, Outtask settled on Angel.com, a Web-based provider of turnkey speech recognition and interactive voice response (IVR) solutions.

Angel.com specializes in providing hosted IVR solutions, and has developed online offerings - such as IVR for Web services - that furnish companies with tools to provide on-demand phone access to Web-based applications. Angel.com has developed and maintains a broad range of pre-built components geared toward the low-cost creation of new IVR applications. Once companies create new IVR service applications on Angel.com's Voice Site platform, they can rebrand and resell those services under private labels, or integrate them with an existing Web offering.

Angel.com's online IVR product allows a motivated client to create, within hours of starting, a prototype that integrates with a company's existing system. Once an IVR application is up and running, clients can use Angel.com's online interface to manage and update it, as well as add services and capacity.

Because one of Angel.com's main service objectives is tied to adding IVR functionality to existing Web-based services, its service model fits well with Outtask's goal of making the most of its SOA - a common service layer that can be invoked by other applications.

The Solution
Once the decision was made, Outtask quickly set out to use the Angel.com system to validate the viability of an open standards hosted approach to building its IVR application. Outtask was able to deploy several same-day, proof-of-concept systems that served as vehicles to demonstrate how Angel.com technology would work with Outtask's back-end infrastructure.

The prototype applications successfully leveraged Outtask's existing Web services architecture, and the fact that Outtask could reuse its SOA for a new type of client convinced the firm's technical team that it could use the Angel.com system to voice-enable its existing enterprise data.

Plus, Outtask felt that by serving customer needs from the outset, the company would be able to clearly determine which business processes were the best candidates for a phone-based approach.

One Example
For its Cliqbook Travel Management service, Outtask uses proprietary technology to aggregate travel reservation content from multiple providers. These data feeds fuel a business layer that exposes a uniform Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) facade (see Figure 1).

Outtask's Web-based interfaces consume these Web services and use standard XSL transformations to render the graphical elements. In this case, the job of integrating the Angel-based IVR with existing Outtask systems was made easier because there was a strict separation between the presentation layer and the services it accessed. Consequently, the Web services were readily available and accessible for reuse for IVR consumption.

A significant strength of the Angel.com system was that it effectively presented itself simply as another Web client. Because of this, Outtask was able to use a different set of XSL transformations to render the responses from the SOAP calls into Angel.com's XML format for IVR interactions.

A New Service Is Born
Outtask rolled out its first phone-based applications within several days, and its first full solution in three weeks. Two new products - voice-enabled Cliqbook and Vinnet - were available in a little less than 10 weeks.

As part of the solutions, Outtask also incorporated a new breed of voice user interface (VUI) that was jointly created by Angel.com and VoicePartners, a design firm that devises solutions for a range of speech recognition and telephony platforms.