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IVR
Sales Down as Market Reinvents Itself
A lingering hangover of premature purchases driven by Y2K and an
overall depressed economy has resulted in the second down year in
a row for the US Interactive Voice Response (IVR) market, according
to In-Stat/MDR.
However, despite an 8% loss in port sales, both Nortel and Edify
proved the market was still viable, with significant year over year
gains. As the market reinvents itself, it will continue its drop
in 2002, eventually returning to growth in 2003.
"The IVR market is currently going through the biggest change
in its history, says Brian Strachman, a Senior Analyst with the
high-tech market research firm.
Revolutions in technology are changing where and how IVR systems
are used. Voice eXtensible Markup Language (VXML) opens the door
to hosted IVR services and custom applications. In addition, advances
in speech recognition are broadening the scope of potential applications,
while Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) is poised to open
the floodgates of IVR applications into the wireless market.
In-Stat/MDR reports that the following factors are also affecting
the IVR market today:
• The importance of measuring Return on Investment (ROI)
in a tight economy
• Significant advances in speech recognition which are making
IVR both more user friendly and more pervasive
• The emergence of enterprise voice portals as businesses
begin to utilize IVR as a tool for voice access to all corporate
information
• The lingering after effects of the dot com demise
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