I spent much of last week in sunny Phoenix at Interactive Intelligence’s partner conference, which was quite a show. For a company of roughly 600 people, competing with the likes of the Cisco’s and Avaya’s of the world, they are doing all right. After 15 consecutive profitable quarters, cash flow is up, sales are way up, and they keep getting awards like Indianapolis’s sixth fastest growing company, placement among Indiana’s 50 great businesses, and just missed cracking the 200 mark among the top 500 Global Software and Services Suppliers – the company ranked 209th in this year’s Software 500, up 21 spots compared to last year.
Enough of the kudos. What is important is that they have moved from initially selling software only years back to being a complete solutions provider for contact center automation, enterprise IP telephony, and enterprise messaging. Yet, where many, many companies can say that they have made the switch, Interactive Intelligence really has. We received a clear message that they know who they are, how they can compete, where they won’t win, how they can win, where they are strong, and most importantly, what products and solutions they need to add and what set of companies/products they need to fund integrations with.
As an analyst that means a lot to me. Sometimes at these events we see companies that have grandiose plans, but don’t execute. Other times companies claim to be in a market space that they are not really in, but want to catch the media buzz. More often, they aren’t addressing a market niche that they need to play in, or they are missing products, or acquire the wrong companies to fill holes in their product lines.
Not so with Interactive Intelligence. Their software platform, which took a “unified” approach from inception, has enabled them to add applications smoothly, so that when it comes to doing the tough stuff, like adding presence across the organization/contact center, they can do so without much pain. They haven’t had the integration pain of serially acquiring companies and absorbing product lines. They have just consistently executed on their product plans year after year. Their product roadmap is on target and makes sense. Although I can’t share the roadmap, I can say that they are working on several initiatives, including formalizing their business process automation offering, refining their SaaS packages, and (Yippee!!) adding speech analytics. Here are some of the highlights of the last year for Interactive. They:
• Started shipping Interaction Optimizer – their workforce management software
• Are building presence and credibility in the SaaS and IP-PBX markets
• Provided tighter integration out of the box with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging and Office Communicator.
• Added email routing to Vonexus Enterprise Interaction Center (EIC)
• Launched their EIC and Customer Interaction Center (CIC) release 3.0 with enhanced security, broader integration, simplified deployment and new mobility applications (see 10/8/07 blog)
• Speech-enabled unified communications functions using Loquendo and Nuance.
In addition, since it was a partner conference they had a technology fair with a lot of their key partners there including AudioCodes, Dialogic, Polycom, Alliance Systems and Aculab, among others. As for partners, it was very nice to hear first hand, the level of integration that some of the partners have done with Interactive.
So, as for that near miss on getting into the top 200 out of the top 500 Global Software and Services Suppliers list? Next year I think they just might make it.