Enghouse Systems, Ltd and Syntellect acquire Envox Group AB
Enghouse Systems Ltd., and its more well-known US subsidiary, Syntellect, acquired Envox Group AB this week. Speaking just of Syntellect and Envox alone, both have communication development platforms, extremely similar products and practices providing speech self-service and contact center solutions to the enterprise and hosted markets.
At first I wondered, consolidation play or something else? Certainly it’s a consolidation play. With more than 1.24 million IVR ports and more than a million contact center agents worldwide; this obviously gives Syntellect a leg up in the market share category. It also broadens their geographic coverage from a partner perspective too. But it is more than consolidation. Without going into deep detail about the nuances of their different product sets, it also gives Syntellect more product options quicker than they might have had alone. For example, Envox has broad support for a number of media types on their platform, which Syntellect does too, but this will give Syntellect support for media such as video and SMS right away. So, whereas the contact center industry vendors talk up video, it certainly isn’t prolific yet, but the addition of this capability will position Syntellect customers to take advantage of video as more uses for it in the contact center become apparent. I also believe this will speed up any potential move on Syntellect’s part of providing customers with unified communications type functionality.
Envox customers will also benefit from Syntellect’s product portfolio as well. Syntellect’s Customer Interaction Management suite brings a fully featured set of multi-media contact center capabilities that can leverage the existing Envox platform ports. Also, Voiyager, Syntellect’s superlative development and testing solution for VoiceXML applications that I have regularly blogged about will be a bonus for Envox customers. If Syntellect could combine Voiyager with some of the development tools that Envox has it would be a knock out. Just a thought, if this merging of product sets is done well.
Nancy,
I have not been tracking legacy IVR providers as much as you may have been doing, but this consolidation will be helpful to support the impact that mobility and UC will have on customer contact. In particular, the role of IVR as a “reactive” user interface will shift to more pro-active applications, especially with the move to “CEPB” (Communications Enabled Business Process) capabilities that automated business applications can exploit.
Not only will the pro-active approach be useful for customer satisfaction purposes when deployed for real-time customer care needs (e.g., a cancelled flight as opposed to a telemarketing pitch), but it will also drive the need for “Customer UC” flexibility when most consumers carry multi-modal “smart-phones.” That’s a future that traditional IVR application developers can pursue that will get us away from the inefficiencies of the legacy TUI. That’s what I will be watching for!