IVR Market Still Shaking Off its Y2K Hangover

According to In-Stat/MDR, this market was down again partly due to the lagging Y2K hangover, but primarily because of the continuing slow economy. However, the high-tech market research firm believes that the market will improve modestly during 2003, with larger gains coming in 2004 and beyond. In addition, across the economy, especially the high tech and telecom sectors, sales have been down. Capital expenditures have been almost non-existent for many companies, and have been drastically reduced in most others. In-Stat/MDR believes that Y2K upgrades will have little or no effect on the IVR market from 2003 forward. However, while many positive signs indicate that things have turned around, overall growth in the short-term will probably be moderate. New technologies, such as VXML and SALT, will help fuel the market by providing opportunities for new players to enter the market and provide new functionality that will cause new customers to implement IVR solutions. While premise IVR system sales will grow again in 2003, they will be outpaced by hosted solutions, which will grow at a faster pace through 2007. In-Stat/MDR has also found that: Although the market was down more in 2002 than in 2001, three vendors were able to achieve gains in the tough economy. With sales of 7,685 ports, Syntellect exceeded 2001 numbers by 18.5%. The gain is primarily attributable to strong add-on ports sales. Interactive Intelligence is fairly new to the IVR market and beat 2001 sales of 2,972 ports by 15.2%. It should be noted that these were for standalone IVR sales only. They would have done even better had we been able to accurately account for IVR ports included in Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) system sales. Nortel beat their 2001 numbers by 4.7%, with sales of 67,178 ports. This is quite good in the down economy.