Don Brown, Interactive Intelligence's chairman, president and CEO, told me he wants to compete against the likes of BEA and Ultimus in providing programming tools that *automate* business processes, instead of *just* communications-enabling those processes. In Brown's view of things, communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) "undershoots the potential" of the cluster of technologies that are typically deployed first in the contact center, which is the marketplace where Interactive Intelligence has its historic strength.
Indeed, it's in the contact center processes that Brown sees the greatest opportunity for a real revolution driven by the new software-based systems. "The contact center remains our bread and butter, because that's the proving grounds for applications," he said. Specifically, he calls out the contact center's ability to not just route communications traffic intelligently, but to assign and track work and gather results: "In the contact center, we measure people out the wazoo," Brown said. [Editor's note: I think I crossed the Wazoo River when I drove from Chicago to Indianapolis for the meeting.]
And while other vendors focus on call control or presence as the next generation's center of gravity, Brown said he believes the PBX is basically plumbing, and presence is a "fairly trivial function." Unlike many other vendors, he doesn't believe his company needs to own the presence function to own the customer.
Instead, Interactive hopes process automation will provide the compelling ROI story, and they brought in an erstwhile customer, Rick Chin, to serve as the company's manager of solutions marketing to promote the idea. Rick implemented an Interactive Intelligence solution when he was with Pinnacle Mortgage Corp., and used it to automate processes around mortgage approvals. He said that applying contact center-like processes and measurements let Pinnacle shave time out of the process, and the reporting was superior to traditional business process automation software. "Most people who try to automate something have no way to measure it afterwards," he said.
Rick Chin claimed that the Interactive Intelligence system generated an ROI that led the company to mothball three NEC switches that hadn't even been paid for, because the savings with Interactive Intelligence more than made up for the ongoing payments on the switches. He also said that business units within Pinnacle started demanding the system's capabilities for their own processes: "We had a groundswell."
With revenues of just north of $100 million, Interactive Intelligence is still a niche player, and it doesn't have the full range of check-off items when it comes to unified communications, or even for that matter IP telephony: Most notably, the company doesn't make its own phones and relies on SIP phones as their telephony endpoints. For a company whose strength is in the contact center, that's not a fatal flaw, but it seems likely to limit Interactive's ability to repeat the Pinnacle experience on a broad scale at very large enterprises.
Also, the relationship of the vendor's Interaction Client with Microsoft OCS is interesting. Tim Passios, director of product marketing, said Interactive has figured out how to federate its presence engine with OCS's--a capability that IBM Lotus, among others, has been at loggerheads with Microsoft about. When I asked how they do it, the Interactive folks told me it was a "secret sauce" kind of deal.
Real editor's note: After this piece went out as a VoiceCon newsletter, I heard from someone at Microsoft who mocked the idea that there was any secret sauce involved, and pointed me here, to a spec that apparently has been posted on the Microsoft website for three years. So I asked Interactive Intelligence about that, and here's what I heard back from Roe Jones, product manager at Interactive Intelligence:
There are a few clarifications that should be made. The MSFT term "federated presence" isn't exactly what we are doing and we are not using the API provided in the link below. We are however using publicly available OCS APIs to get the presence of an OCS user. It's what we do with the status once we have it that we believe differentiates our solution. Once we have this presence we use our own Status Aggregator technology to "map" the OCS presence to a pre-defined status on the Interaction Center Platform.
On the other hand, Interactive relies on Microsoft for features it doesn't support natively, such as IM and video connectivity. And yet, you can't embed Interaction Client in Communicator or vice versa, meaning users who have both systems will have to use both clients to meet all their needs. Whether this is a big deal or not remains to be seen.
All in all, Interactive Intelligence is adding another layer to the CEBP/UC story, and providing more ammunition for those who see the contact center not just as the killer app for next-gen communications, but as the model for it.
