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Call center and IVR systems have long been proprietary strongholds. Now open source standards and systems are changing customers' choices.
A decade ago, Linux was a hobbyist's operating system. I distinctly remember loading it for the first time, floppy by floppy (there were 75 or so), onto a 386SX so that I could have a C compiler without having to use the computers in the college labs. Today, Linux is the heart of my company's interactive voice response (IVR) platform, where we depend upon it to answer and process 60,000 phone calls a day, 24×7, without even questioning its suitability for the task.
Linux supports both the call-flow and the computer telephony integration (CTI) tiers of our IVR. Together they automate a substantial portion of those 60,000 phone calls via tight integration with our customer relationship management (CRM) application.
In the call-flow tier, the voice response units (VRUs)-VoiceGenie VoiceXML browser-run on Linux. In the CTI tier, Linux applications provide screen pops into our call center apps, launch the appropriate Web-based applications on the customer service representative (CSR) desktop when the call arrives, pull up the correct customer record and propagate all the IVR-collected information on to the CSR. All of which makes the bean counters happy, because the use of Linux instead of "name brand" applications reduces costs. (Our VoiceXML IVR deployment had an ROI of less than six months.)
And using Linux makes me happy as well, in multiple respects. When I wear my operations hat, I see everything running on commodity hardware-just a rack of regular IU Web-server boxes, a few of which have telephony cards in them. No fossils with special maintenance contracts, no one-off security concerns, and no difficulties integrating with any number of network management systems. (We use an open source monitoring system called Nagios.)
When real-world things happen to Linux servers, like hard drive failures, we hot-swap a disk, just as we would in any other server in a datacenter. At the time of writing, several of the production IVR systems have been running for more than 490 days without so much as a reboot. And those aren't idyllic days spent running SETI@Home: besides the constant call traffic, we also do batch reporting jobs, install security patches, create...