Greetings,
This is not a Cisco issue, but as a switch/router engineer at heart, I trust y'all to have a wide experience of networking. My posts in comp.dcom.sys.nortel and comp.speech.research have not gotten any hits.
We are getting ready to migrate multiple IVR applications from analog to PRI.
Each application will have a unique lead phone number with every lead number present on every PRI and even call distribution across all PRIs. The IVR software uses the DNIS dialed number to route each call to the correct application process on the correct server.
In the present system, concurrent calls are capped by the number of analog phone lines present for each application. We are migrating from this ancient system to a stack of servers with PRI cards and IVR software. Touch-tone and speech-recognition trees are being reverse-engineered and applications rewritten from scratch for a modern IVR platform.
We must have a boundary between the applications to prevent one app from taking over all B channels. I want to set a different concurrent call limit for each application. Call limits are also used for chargeback to our customers.
Having exhausted our telco asking how to do this, we have come to the conclusion that telco is not the right place to set these limits. The right place for the call limits seems to be in the application. I'm thinking that each IVR app would keep track of its concurrent calls and send an "all circuits busy message" to callers when the call-limit is exceeded.
To make a business case for application-based call-limits, I'm looking for support from someone familiar with best practice in this area. I'd settle for someone who has actually seen a multi-app, PRI-based IVR with concurrent calls capped for each app.
Doug