It runs on top of the Microsoft Windows Operating System thereby allowing one to take advantage of the benefits that modern Windows Server environments now provide (stability, ease of use, wide-spread adoption etc).

Some of the challenges faced by developers when building high-end telecommunications are as follows:

• The steep learning curve required to understand the underlying API for speech and signal processing boards, slowing the time-to-market significantly.

• The requirement to produce a stable and bug-free application that can process hundreds of thousands (or millions) of calls arriving under high loads, whilst still achieving 99.999% (five nines) availability as required by mission critical applications.

• The need to maintain and develop a large code base that is written in low level programming languages such as C/C++ both for existing and new applications.

• The need to be able to make changes to a live running telecommunications application server without stopping any of the services whilst still ensuring the 99.999% availability is met.

• The need to add new IVR services seamlessly to existing running systems with requiring a complete recompilation of the core code or stopping the service.

• The need to enable customers to make their own modifications when necessary without requiring intervention by the original equipment manufacturer. For example a company running a large premium rate IVR service will need to have the ability to add new IVR services or modify existing services at will.

• The need to interface with existing host databases and servers.

The Telecom Engine addresses all of the above concerns and provides a stable virtual engine and simple high level scripting language that has been optimized using techniques borrowed from 3D gaming engines. It provides a high speed multi-tasking environment that switches between tasks at a rate of many tens of thousands of times per second to allow many hundreds or thousands of channels of speech and call-processing to be controlled in a single PC chassis.

The Engine takes a 'thin-client' approach to the implementation of the underlying Aculab and PIKA APIs thereby providing access to all of the power of the underlying boards whilst vastly simplifying the development cycle.

A simple example is shown below to show the power and simplicity of the language. This example (for ACULAB boards) waits for a call on the first channel of the first E1 and then plays a voice prompt to the caller before hanging up. This example is less than 50 lines of code, whereas a similar application with the same functionality written in 'C' would require as much as 3000 lines of code to carry out the same functionality (see here for equivalent 'C' program).