Last week Interactive Intelligence held their EMEA partner meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. Summer-warm, it was an attractive setting to deliver the message that EMEA is seen as an important growth market for the company.
CEO Don Brown was there to deliver both the opening and closing sessions, just as he does at the North American sessions I've attended for the last few years. As was true in October, a key message in Lisbon was Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS) as an engine for growth. Brown posited that perhaps 25% of contact center orders industry-wide will come from SaaS over the next few years, and that the percentage may even be north of that. Interaction Process Automation--the company's workflow application--was also a highlighted solution, with five different breakout sessions dedicated to it.
The biggest impression I was left with after the three-day meeting was that And that they are investing in the region to make that opportunity a reality.
One of those investments was the acquisition of Germany-based reseller Agori on February 28. With 20+ employees, a large portion of whom are English-speaking professional services staff, Agori gives Interactive Intelligence not only a solid base in Germany, Austria and Switzerland but staff that can be used for projects across EMEA.
Another investment is in sales and marketing staff, where Don Brown’s comments to his EMEA partners were "we're hiring like crazy" and "we'd love nothing than for EMEA to outpace the US in growth." At a steady 20 percent of corporate revenue for the past couple of years, EMEA has paced North America, but there is clearly the sense that the region could contribute even more.
One of the areas where Interactive Intelligence has always excelled is in the availability of their solution in multiple languages, 24 at last count. One partner that helps support the multi-lingual needs of the EMEA customer base is Loquendo, one of the sponsors of last week’s event. In the video below, Monica Bisacca of Loquendo talks about the increasing adoption of speech technologies in EMEA.
