Interactive Intelligence’s recent analyst event provided insight into their successful strategy for contact center cloud solutions. While continuing strong growth in their core premise based Customer Interaction Platform (CIC), its cloud-based solutions achieved impressive growth in new sales orders and have increased from 5% of orders in 2009 to 35% in 2012. During 2013, Interactive Intelligence forecasts 50% of sales orders will come from its cloud-based offering. Interactive Intelligence’s platform offers a comprehensive all-in-one software solution that supports contact center solutions resulting in faster time to market for its customers. Its tiered pricing model makes it an attractive choice for both small and large customers that want to either upgrade their legacy platforms or are just getting started and find cloud-based services are both simple to deploy and scalable.
During the last few years Interactive Intelligence has progressively attracted larger sized accounts, while continuing to market successfully in the SMB and mid-market segment. The company reinvests a larger than average percentage of its profits into R&D enabling it to continue to enhance its product line and introduce new products for value added services. Recent product announcements include its Interaction Mobilizer for publishing mobile apps and linking directly them to agents and Interaction Analyzer for speech analytics. Additionally, Interactive Intelligence’s functionality has expanded through new acquisitions including Latitude, Bay Bridge (formerly Centerbridge), and AcroSoft. It also has forged partnerships with Salesforce.com, Oracle RightNow and Microsoft Lync to round out its product line and improve its cloud offerings.
Another milestone for Interactive Intelligence is its international expansion that now includes presence in 35 countries across 5 continents. This expansion has also lead to adding more international data centers for global cloud services. Its geographical footprint includes countries such as Canada, UK, Germany, Japan, ANZ and Benelux. In addition to geographical expansion, it also has achieved success in in key verticals, such as insurance, collections and utilities and plans to increase its foot print in banks and credit unions, outsourcers, healthcare and government going forward.
While many of its contact center competitors stalled or lost market share last year (with the exception of Cisco), Interactive Intelligence kept gaining ground. I believe that part of its success is due to identifying the market potential for cloud services several years ago and going to market with its CaaS offering ahead of its competitors. The simplicity and speed of deployment for cloud contact center services offers a good alternative to continued investment in premise solutions and attracts companies who realize that they need to upgrade to meet the demands of customers who expect seamless omni-channel personalized support. However, the cloud is not right for every company, and Interactive Intelligence wisely continues to offer premise based solutions as part of its core product line. Another factor that I think is important to its growth is continued large R&D investments in improving its product line across many of its applications to deliver increased value to its customers.