Interactive Intelligence Receives Frost & Sullivan’s Company of the Year, Contact Center Systems North America, 2012 Award

For the third consecutive year, Frost & Sullivan has honored Interactive Intelligence with its Company of the Year, Contact Center Systems North America, 2012 award. In doing so Frost & Sullivan noted that “Developing innovative, attention-grabbing customer engagement solutions has been the hallmark of Interactive Intelligence since its founding in 1994. The firm has set a course that its competitors have followed, and in doing so it has achieved considerable marketplace success. It continues to enhance its CIC platform, delivered in the cloud as well as through premise licenses.”

Frost & Sullivan’s methodology ensures all vendors are objectively assessed on the following measures: (1) Growth strategy excellence; (2) Growth implementation excellence; (3) Degree of innovation with products and technologies; (4) Leadership in customer value; and (5) Leadership in market penetration. Each measure is weighted evenly and scored on a scale of one to 10. In the final assessment Interactive Intelligence beat out its top two competitors with an average overall score of 8.8, compared to 8.4 and 7.6, respectively, as shown in the decision support matrix below.

Decision Support Matrix for Company of the Year Award

The Company’s key attributes by award criteria were:

Growth Strategy Excellence: “In a market being taken over by hosted providers, including other systems suppliers, Interactive Intelligence is playing to its strengths as a developer and creator of a proven all-in-one suite. Indeed, the company has had considerable success in selling its Customer Interaction Platform (CIC) platform as a tightly integrated application suite, initially developing a base in the mid-market, but more recently making inroads into the larger enterprise market ... Interactive Intelligence has done this by developing solid core functionality in contact centers and adjacent IP telephony applications, and then incrementally adding applications in a way that is consumable and affordable for its base.”

Growth Implementation Excellence: “Interactive Intelligence's growth implementation excellence was due to a combination of savvy technical and marketing efforts. On the technical side, success was due to Interactive Intelligence's addition of new functionality to its CIC platform, and the parallel growth of its [Communications as a Service] CaaS, cloud-based platform. On the marketing side, Interactive Intelligence has demonstrated leadership in creating awareness that rivals that of its larger competitors. From a highly useable and informative website with campaign-oriented micro sites, to creative print ad and trade show material, along with an aggressive year's long PR campaign.”

Degree of Innovation with Products and Technologies: “The Company also has created one of the most competitively featured platforms in the market. In addition to internally developing all six contact center segments, for both premise-based and hosted deployments, CIC also includes SIP-based switching, unified communications capabilities, e-mail response and knowledge-based management, and business process automation capabilities. All this has enabled customers to derive value across the enterprise through the integration of contact center and broader enterprise applications.”

Leadership in Customer Value: “Perhaps the strongest way that Interactive Intelligence provides customer value is through the addition of CaaS. This can be considered from three perspectives. First, Interactive Intelligence is one of a very few companies that can offer hosted and premise-based deployments, while allowing customers to move back and forth between the two. In effect, a customer can use overflow from their premise CIC system to CaaS, or they can start on CaaS and use CIC. Second, CaaS is configurable to a range of different deployment models. For example, the company's hybrid "Local Control" model keeps all voice traffic, recordings, and sensitive customer data within the customer's network. Only the CIC software sits on Interactive Intelligence's servers. … Third, Interactive Intelligence has placed a premium on CaaS reliability and security.”

Leadership in Market Penetration: “While still not the market leader, Interactive Intelligence has made positive inroads in growing market share in all contact center systems and hosted ACD and [Agent Performance Optimization] APO segments. In a tough market Interactive Intelligence gained market share overall, and in fact, grew share in outbound dialing, one of the hardest hit of the systems segments (down 11.8%) by almost 3%.”

Frost & Sullivan’s award is strongly supported by Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, Worldwide report (June 27, 2012) which places Interactive Intelligence in the leaders quadrant. Gartner highlights the following strengths:

• “Interactive Intelligence's Customer Interaction Center contact center suite uses Web services and provides a common set of application development, management and reporting tools across a range of its applications. Its efficient use of server resources and consistent administrative and management tools across applications makes the system particularly appealing to IT decision makers.”
  
  
• “Interactive Intelligence continues to compete successfully for midsize and large contact center deals and continues to grow at a pace well above the market average. The company is improving its brand recognition in North America and is making steady progress to increase its sales and marketing footprint globally.”
  
  
• “Interactive Intelligence is finding success in selling its hosted and hybrid (on-premises and hosted) solutions in enterprises of various sizes.”