Frost & Sullivan names Interactive Intelligence technology company of the year

Global research and consulting firm, Frost & Sullivan, has honoured Interactive Intelligence (Nasdaq: ININ) with its “2010 North American Technology Company of the Year, Contact Centers” award.

Interactive Intelligence, which provides unified IP communications solutions for contact centres and enterprises, was selected for the award primarily based on the vendor's technology leadership, according to Frost & Sullivan's principal analyst, Joe Outlaw.

“Examples of Interactive's leadership include how the value of its all-in-one architecture became more compelling as the economy worsened; how it grew its large enterprise market share by scaling higher and deepening its business user functionality; and how expanding into new application areas, such as business process automation, reset the competitive playing field,” Outlaw said.

Frost & Sullivan's research methodology for the award includes a “decision support matrix” that shows a weighted ranking based on growth strategy and implementation; degree of innovation in business processes, products and/or technologies; and leadership in customer value and market penetration.

Based on vendor interviews, end-user surveys, and extensive secondary research, Frost & Sullivan ranked Interactive Intelligence 8.6 overall on a scale of one to 10, compared to the two other finalists, which were ranked 8.1 and 7.7 (Note: To protect the interests of the award recipient's competitors, Frost & Sullivan refers to them anonymously as Competitor 1 and Competitor 2).

Interactive Intelligence received a perfect “10” on Frost & Sullivan's “degree of innovation in business processes, products and/or technologies” criterion.

In a report about the award results, Frost & Sullivan stated: “Interactive Intelligence has built and continues to refine its internal processes to maintain its speed and agility. For external-facing processes, it offers pre-packaged service engagements of fixed scope and price to reduce the up-front time and effort typically associated with service engagements, and to give customers easy-to-understand, lower risk options.”

Frost & Sullivan also commended the uniqueness of Interactive Intelligence's communications-based process automation solution, Interaction Process Automation (IPA).

“There are fundamental differences between communications-enabled business process solutions and IPA,” Outlaw said. “Instead of merely embedding communications functions into applications, Interactive Intelligence has opted to use its core communications platform as the basis for automation. In this way, IPA gives customers the ability to automate and track entire multi-step processes - including those that fall outside of communications - thus providing significant and measurable ROI.”

Frost & Sullivan also emphasised Interactive Intelligence's increasing success in securing larger enterprise customers.

“Many of the core value propositions of Interactive's all-in-one IP communications software suite are increasingly being valued by larger enterprises and contact centres,” Outlaw said. “These value propositions include the suite's single-platform, standards-based software design that gives organisations enterprise-wide applications at a low total-cost-of-ownership, and with maximum interoperability and ease-of-management.”

A Frost & Sullivan report containing details about the Interactive Intelligence “Technology Company of the Year” award can be downloaded for free at http://www.inin.com/FrostSullivanAward2010/.

For more information about the Frost & Sullivan awards program, visit http://www.awards.frost.com.