On the first day of Intervoice's Analyst Conference this week, Jim Milton, President & COO (Jim had been COO for a while and was recently named President), presented a list of "key takeaways" he hoped the analysts would walk away with. I assumed that we would indeed see Intervoice in a positive light in all of these areas (or else Milton wouldn't have been so bold as to challenge us to do so), but by the end of the day and a half of the conference, I did indeed walk away believing all of these points. Of course there are plenty of challenges ahead, but I believe that the company is in a good competitive position in several areas.
Milton laid out Intervoice's vision of "a world where seamless communication transcends time, space and language." For this vision to be achieved, there needs to be convergence (I know, I hate that word too) between the carriers or network providers and the enterprise in order to provide a consistent experience for users when they are on a mobile device and when they are in the office. One of the missing pieces in most enterprise vendors' UC stories is the role of the carrier and how they will be engaged. Intervoice is in a relatively rare position in that is has a foot in both the enterprise and carrier camps, which it can use to its advantage.
Like most other vendors, Intervoice is moving from its hardware heritage to becoming a software and services company and has introduced its Unified Services Platform, providing a common platform across the enterprise and network realms. The Intervoice Unified Services Platform is a middleware platform, enabling Intervoice, its partners, and its customers to develop applications that run on the platform for both the enterprise and carrier markets. As an application delivery platform, the Unified Services Platform enables applications to integrate with various information sources, such as CRM/ERP data or a messaging server, and provides multiple channels of interaction to multiple stakeholders. The same Media Server is used in both network and enterprise deployments, and applications written for one domain can be leveraged in the other.
Intervoice's key products - Intervoice Voice Portal, Contact Portal, and Media Exchange (IP messaging) - are all based on this common IP-centric framework, which leverages off-the-shelf hardware.
There weren't many new announcements made at the conference, with the exception of the Intervoice Contact Portal (ICP), a new contact center solution that enables customers to move from self service to Live Agent support. It consists of three elements: Intervoice Voice Portal, IP Contact Center (SIP based, multichannel, multisite, live agent routing and queuing), and Outbound Notification (real-time information delivered via automated voice, SMS, or email).
Of course we discussed Unified Communications at the conference, and I'm pleased to say that Intervoice isn't jumping on the UC bandwagon. The company does see a role for itself in the UC world, but is waiting for more standards to be agreed upon and for better ways to have federation and aggregation among the various UC offerings. Intervoice has always been a best-of-breed IVR/voice portal provider that integrates with any switch, and being switch and vendor agnostic and heterogeneous is in the company's DNA. This will also be the case in the UC world. The company views UC as the infrastructure or platform for delivering communications between people (fellow nojitter blogger Sheila McGee-Smith and I shook our heads in disagreement as this was explained), with companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco providing the UC backbone to provide presence, collaboration, etc. Intervoice sees its role as providing the applications that layer on top of this infrastructure - once there are more UC standards in place. For example, the Intervoice Contact Portal will interoperate with UC backbones as they evolve, mature and become standards based. In addition, Intervoice's notification services can be used as the trigger for CEBP applications.
On the network side, Intervoice can play in the UC (or IMS) space with its Media Exchange platform, which supports multiple media and will deliver context and location awareness capabilities. Delivery of messages and communications will adapt based on context (if I'm in a meeting, don't send a message via voice but instead via text). Context-based messaging will enable callers to check presence to determine the best way to reach someone (or not). The called party can be reached how he/she chooses regardless of device/location/activity. Media Exchange's multimodal capabilities are also pretty cool - users can reply to messages by voice, video, text, or voice SMS. One of Intervoice's customers, John Carvalho of O2, noted that Media Exchange is the building block that lets O2 deploy new services and add capabilities such as speech recognition, text-to-speech, speech to text, MMS, presence, email, and other capabilities.
Intervoice is a relatively small company competing with the likes of Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel on the enterprise side, and Comverse, Alcatel-Lucent, and others on the network side, and doesn't have the market presence or reach of its competitors. It still needs to beef up its marketing programs and campaigns to increase market awareness, and has to move from its roots as a technology company to more of a marketing company. While it will never have the marketing muscle of its competitors, Intervoice has strong products and a very strong Global Consulting Services program and team that helps the company win deals. And most important, it has extremely loyal and satisfied customers.
