Unified Communications

Voxeo (News - Alert), a vendor of interactive voice response (IVR) platforms and IVR hosting for enterprises, call centers, and IVR developers, today was recognized with the “2008 North American Frost &Sullivan Award for Product Innovation.”

Officials said that the company’s “Prophecy” IVR platform, an award-winning product from Voxeo, is a proven, reliable, and flexible solution for VoiceXML (News - Alert) application development and deployment.

Frost & Sullivan, a business research and consulting firm, conducted a detailed IVR market analysis before it identified Prophecy as “cost-effective with a secure and fault-resilient tiered architecture that is simple to install.”

Prophecy features advanced call control that allows companies to deliver both completely automated answering solutions and solutions that gather information, as well as to connect callers to the appropriate employee or agent, company officials say.

Voxeo gives enterprises the ability to deploy premise-based, mission-critical IVR, speech and VoIP applications without the expense and difficulty of installing their own redundant servers and telephony infrastructure, company officials say. Also, they say, it delivers automatic and seamless call failover and overflow between customer premise installations of Prophecy and the hosted solution.

“Encouraged by the prospect of automating common phone inquiries, Voxeo is constantly developing innovative solutions and through the Prophecy product suite, is adapting to increased user demands by extending the capabilities of today’s standards and platforms,” said Gaurav Sundararaman, a research analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

Voxeo uses a Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (SIP) platform that is friendly to VoIP environments, according to the company. Voxeo, unlike other providers, integrates free text-to-speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) engines, conferencing, and call recording into the IVR as native capabilities.

Prophecy IVR platform runs Voice XML gateway software on open and readily available hardware, according to the company. It also routes, balances, and controls calls between Telephony Gateways and VoiceXML servers.

Prophecy IVR platform currently supports more than 400 production customers and 30,000 developers and has built more than 60,000 applications to date, according to the company.

“The company’s Evolution community and professional IVR developer programs make it easy for enterprise Web and telephony developers to create custom IVR applications for any requirement or project,” Gaurav said. “Prophecy provides twin benefits of efficiency and easy integration, easing communication, reducing call center costs, and increasing customer satisfaction.”

Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) officials say they appreciated Voxeo for its relentless R&D effort into simplifying all aspects of the IVR solution and its judicious use of time and energy into building a rich developer environment and partnering with best-in-class application developers to provide its customers with a total solution that meets their exact needs.

Prophecy IVR achieved a substantial return on investment (ROI) over the last few years, officials say. Along with the technical versatility and excellent customer service, Voxeo’s ability to cater to rising enterprise demands is worthy of applause, according to Frost & Sullivan.