Slowly we have seen more consolidation in the speech industry, typically by companies such as Microsoft or Nuance. Whereas Syntellect has made some acquisitions of its own, such as contact center vendor Apropos in 2005 and Teloquent in 2003, this is the first time they have supplemented their arsenal with a speech recognition player. But it makes sense from several standpoints, and if Fluency was looking to be acquired this will be a good place for them.
Fluency's solutions are platform-independent, which is completely in line with Syntellect's own philosophy of providing platform-independent contact center and speech solutions. Fluency looks to have a pretty comprehensive set of packaged solutions, which is also a direction for Syntellect, and providing them in an on-demand fashion, particularly multi-tenant, will add to Syntellect's growing hosted solutions business as well. The fact that Fluency has its own voice verification technology also will give Syntellect customers an additional option for verification besides using a third party solution such as Nuance.
Syntellect has a growing business in the UK, with some impressive wins in the last year. Fluency, based in the UK, has a professional services staff that will definitely complement and add to Syntellect's UK presence.
Fluency isn't a huge company with hundreds of employees, and from past acquisitions I've seen, Syntellect tends to do acquisitions better than most, both from a personnel and technology perspective (particularly since they went software-only). So I hope that this one goes well. Long-term it should provide Syntellect with some applications and technology to enhance their existing contact center offerings, and complement development of mobility and unified communication-type offerings as well.
