Today, at IBM Interconnect, we are announcing public availability of NetFoundry AppWAN for Watson, alongside the unveiling of IBM’s Voice Gateway product. These two products, both deployed as software, have made it simple, secure and reliable for our pilot contact center customers to leverage Watson voice services.
The Voice Gateway removes the burden of SIP/telephony/Watson integration from the contact center. The NetFoundry AppWAN for Watson connects the contact center to Watson, over any network, with security and reliability. Both products are software based, leveraging horizontally scalable, cloud native sets of microservices, deployable as on-premise Docker containers, virtual machines or appliance, and as cloud images.
AppWAN for Watson Saves Cost & Time
Contact centers love AppWAN for Watson because it connects them to the Watson cloud over their existing Internet providers, saving them cost and time, while still delivering the security and reliability they need.
Watson service developers and integrators love AppWAN for Watson due to its unique architecture of inserting software defined networks inside the needs of the application. AppWANs are built to connect services, rather than the traditional network model in which networks connect nodes. In the traditional model, integrators and operators are left “holding the bag”, trying to retrofit and optimize those networks to deal with the security and performance needs of the services and applications, while the node connections don’t even really know what the apps need (a QoS byte is a sorry excuse for the true needs of an app). AppWANs turn that model inside out, integrating service-specific, software-defined networks, inside each application.
During our presentation and demonstrations at Interconnect, IBM’s Brian Pulito and Tom Banks will share use cases from the insurance industry, and show how contact center agent can leverage a rich variety of Watson cognitive services to deliver a better experience to their consumers. With IBM’s Voice Gateway, and NetFoundry’s AppWAN for Watson, contact centers can quickly and cost effectively leverage these Watson services, consuming them without first undergoing network infrastructure projects and waiting months to try to extend MPLS to Watson data centers.
Contact NetFoundry to get your contact center or enterprise securely and reliably connected to Watson, and rapidly progress from prototype to production, over your existing Internet access providers.
