Contact center and corporate IP phone systems provider Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) has been positioned in the “visionaries” quadrant of analyst firm Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications report.

 

The report provides an analysis of vendors in the unified communications market based on their “completeness of vision and ability to execute.” It also assesses key industry trends.

 

“Our approach to unified communications is quite different than that of other vendors,” said Interactive Intelligence founder and CEO, Dr. Donald E. Brown, in a release. “Rather than simply trying to improve the efficiency of communications, we’ve taken communications technology and used it in an innovative way to automate core business processes.”

In the graphical representation section of the report, companies are placed in one of four quadrants: “Challengers,” “Niche Players;” “Visionaries” and “Leaders.” The two main over-riding criteria used to determine which quadrant a company is placed are “Ability to Execute,” which is the “Y” axis of the graph, and “Completeness of Vision,” which is the “X” axis (there are specific criteria used to determine a company’s “Ability to Execute” and “Completeness of Vision”). Companies are positioned along the “X” and “Y” axis with a single point on the graph, thus determining the quadrant where the company is positioned.

Interactive Intelligence officials said part of the reason the company was named to the “visionaries” quadrant of the report is because of its innovative new Interaction Process Automation product, due for release later this year. The business process automation solution utilizes Interactive’s call routing platform to automate routine “people-centric” processes, such as the processing of loan applications or the on-boarding of employees. The company claims that by leveraging its IP-based unified communications platform to orchestrate the delivery of work, including a wide range of document and file types, organizations can capture, prioritize, route, escalate and track each step of a business process.

 

“By decreasing the number of employees required in a given business process, eliminating process latency, reducing human error, and providing standardized methods for handling processes, IPA delivers on the promise of UC with a straightforward solution offering measurable ROI,” Brown said.

IPA will initially be offered as a software module for Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Center UC platform – however, company officials say it will be available as a stand-alone offering sometime next year. Facilitating the document management piece is the software Interactive Intelligence acquired when it bought Columbia, SC-based software company AcroSoft in May. According to company officials, AcroSoft's document management software, which was created for the insurance industry, will be integrated into the IPA product, and this is what will enable document sharing.

 

To learn more about IPA, click here.

To get a free copy of Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications (News - Alert) report, click here.

 

Yesterday Interactive Intelligence reported “record revenues” of $33.2 million for the third quarter of 2009, an increase of 10.4 percent over the $30.1 million it reported the third quarter of 2008. Interactive Intelligence founder, chairman and CEO, Dr. Donald E. Brown attributed the quarter-over-quarter growth to increased product and services revenue combined with continued expense management.

“During the quarter, we continued to compete well at the mid and upper ends of the market, having received two orders exceeding $1 million and an additional eight orders greater than $250,000,” Brown said in a release.