Cisco Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal 11.0(1)

store, but the rest of the solution components would reside in one or more data centers. Agents
could also be located either in the branch, in the next nearest branch, in centralized call centers,
or any combination thereof.

Under this geography, callers dial local branch phone numbers, rather than centralized phone
numbers, and the caller pays the toll charges. Furthermore, if the caller needs to be queued, his
voice stream remains in the branch gateway until an agent is available. This preserves network
bandwidth.

All of the call flow models are supported with one partial exception: ASR is not generally used
with this geography. This is because ASR requires G.711 encoding, which is very bandwidth
intensive, and bandwidth from branch offices to data centers is usually at a premium. Users
who require this capability should contact their Cisco support representative.

Note, however, that TTS is not affected by the restriction that applies to ASR.

Standalone Branch Geography

The Standalone VoiceXML call flow scenario describes a combination Ingress/VXML Gateway
together with a VoiceXML Server, not integrated with Unified ICME (except potentially as a
back-end server). If Standalone is deployed in a Centralized geography, then one might see a
data center containing some number of gateways sharing some number of VoiceXML Servers,
each with the ability to make requests to back-end databases and servers which are also located
in the data center.

One Branch version of this is to place Ingress/VXML Gateways at branch offices, and have
them share some number of VoiceXML Servers located in the data center, which have the ability
to access back-end databases and servers, also located in the data center. This leads to a
potentially large number of gateways, but an easily manageable number of VoiceXML Servers
(Content Services Switches should also be used here, for load balancing and fault tolerance).
However, a problem that some retail customers have run into has to do with the relative
unreliability of the WAN link between branch and data center. If that link goes down, then even
local self service activities cannot take place.

A second Branch version is to move the VoiceXML Servers to the branch. They may need
access to centralized back-end services, but they can still provide local-only VRU services if
the WAN goes down. Several challenges come with this geography, however:

•

A VoiceXML Server requires an extra box in each branch

•

A VoiceXML Server is not an appliance like the IOS gateway—it may need to be locally
managed by branch office personnel

•

The prospect of remotely managing perhaps thousands of VoiceXML Servers is potentially
daunting—though the Operations Console available with Unified CVP 4.0 provides convenient
handling not available with earlier versions of CVP

Given these just-mentioned considerations, it is usually preferable to use the first Standalone
Branch version if your WAN provisioning is reliable enough.

Planning Guide for Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal 4.0(1)