Asterisk IVR server in a Cisco VoIP system

Question

Here's my situation: We have a Cisco VoIP system that we're very happy with, but I need to implement an IVR application on top of it. My thought is that a virtual machine running Asterisk and an AGI script would do what I need. The catch is hooking it up to the existing Cisco VoIP system so it can accept outside calls. AFAICT, some possible strategies:

1. Set up the Asterisk box as a SIP Trunk that only gets used for a single extension.
2. Make it a physical machine with a FXO card and use a Cisco ATA like an analog phone.

(1) is what I'd like to do, (2) is my B-plan. Am I on the right track here? What are some decent introductory resources (particularly on the Cisco-SIP side, I've got the Asterisk book, and a bunch of example config files came with the asterisk Ubuntu package)?

Answer 1

We did this with a Commander system, not Cisco, but as I used to work for Cisco Tech Support we used to put calls through the the AVVID team with this kind of setup, so I can be fairly sure in saying that they should be compatible.

Basically your a) solution is absolutally correct. We set up a trunk on the IVR box, and at the end of the day we got it to forward the call to an extension inside the Commander system if the failed the IVR process.

If you decide to go via the b) method (with perhaps a Dialogic card or something) then you'll need to familiarise yourself with the Cisco DTMF tones for transferring calls, because you'll need to get the Cisco Callmanager to redirect the call back into the Cisco system if you need to.