As testimony to the importance of conducting rapid-fire customer care analytics across multiple channels, Avaya has completed the purchase of UK-based Aurix Ltd.. Avaya’s new acquisition specializes in (and has intellectual property rights) for its proprietery, phoneme-based speech search and analytic software and systems and competes most directly with Nexidia, Verint and Nuance. On its Web site, the British firm characterized its software as capable of providing “speech-to-text intelligence for a variety of real-time and offline applications in multiple sectors: Customer Contact, Security & Intelligence, Legal and Media Organisations.”

In the contact center will continue to support Aurix’s existing customers and channel partners. It is a product that has proven its mettle in the classic context of deploying analytics on an existing corpus of stored voice files to support agent training and workforce optimization. It is also the root of delivering “relevant screen pops” based on the context of the call and “nuance detection” aimed at both agent and caller.

But that’s only the beginning. The acquisition was driven by the Emerging Technologies business unit, under VP Chris McGugan. He sees the Aurix core engine and IP as foundational technology that can be spliced into a variety of solutions across the entire enterprise. The same attributes that make it possible for the Aurix phonetic speech search engine to monitoring up to 100% of recorded calls makes it possible to do the sort of “near real-time” speech processing to tag the content of the streamed audio associated with video content or collaboration platforms. This, in turn, enables real-time identification, searching and audio mining.

Avaya’s new in-house approach to speech analytics turns it into the connective tissue that can help its enterprise customers connect the dots between other “Big Data” analytics initiatives. It’s no coincidence that only yesterday database and CRM giant Oracle purchased Endeca, a small New England-based company that specializes in analytics and pattern recognition across large repositories of both structured and unstructured data. The difference is that Endeca conducts its analysis of text and other content on the Web and e-commerce sites. Note the lack of speech analytics. In the world of multi-channel, multi-modal and real-time commerce, Avaya recognizes that treating content and meta-data that starts as spoken words may be more important than ever, and now it Avaya doesn’t have to look outside its Emerging Technologies group for what it considers to be the best-in-class technology. At the same time, the company brings a robust set of analytic tools into its mainstream product line and will add an important component to the quality of service that it delivers to its enterprise customers and, in turn, to their customers.

Categories: Articles

Tags: speech analytics, Avaya, Contact Center, Enterprise Software, Mergers and Acquisitions