Develop IP-IVR on Cisco CallManager platform: 1

To Develop an IP-IVR application on CISCO CallManager or CUCM platform, we usually have two options:
1. Based on CTI port / CTI routepoint resources, using TAPI as call control interface and Cisco wave driver as media processing interface.
2. Based on SIP protocol, IVR channels act as SIP phones or SIP trunks (only avaliable after CUCM5.0).
In terms of CTI tech, Option 1 is the third-part CTI while option 2 is the first-part CTI.
For option 2, we can rely on many dev-kits and open source codes, such as Dialogic HMP, Asterisk, sipX, oSIP, OPAL etc, and lead to a general IP-IVR application which is able to apply on any SIP compatible platform.
For option 1, we can only develop a dedicated IP-IVR for CUCM. However, we can get some outstanding advantages accordingly:
a> CTI port is free (no license fee so far), which means we need not pay extra charge on IP-PBX side when deploy IP-IVR system. (Think about it, if you are biding a callcenter with 100-200 ports IVR, you will definitely beat your competitors considering the cost)
b> Easy to implement and maintain. Not only because TAIP and wave programming are simple, but the structure of your application is flat.
c> No risk or potential risk of intellectual property rights
d> Supports almost all features of CISCO device, such as CTI monitoring.
The following posts are going to share my experience about CTI port and wave driver programming.
(To be continued...)