Half way through the first decade of the new millennium, it’s time to take stock of the factors that have had the greatest influence on Conversational Access Technologies’ (CAT’s) progress into enterprise and service provider IT infrastructures. To use the terminology made popular by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) back in the 1980s, CAT is a ‘problem child’. Compared to its data center technology peers, CAT has not performed up to its potential in a marketplace that is characterized by both size and growth.

This is where the notion of “The Terrible 2000s” comes into play. I don’t mean that Conversational Access Technologies are two years old. They just behave like it.

CAT entered the IT and telecom scene in the late 1980s with the advent of client-server computing, interactive voice response and the beginnings of online transaction processing. Its proud parents set high expectations for CAT to have wonderful careers in finance, travel, hospitality, health care and retailing. However, to succeed in business, one’s growth is limited by the ability to work and play well with others.

The behavior of a two-year old is said to foreshadow future behavior as an adolescent. “The Terrible Twos” is a constant tug-of-war during which the individual learns to measure his or her value to the world at large. It’s the time that a person individuates, separates from parents and learns how to behave as a member of a larger society.

The $3 billion Threshold
For the components of CAT – which now include speech processing, call processing/routing, application development resources, application software, professional services, maintenance and hosted speech services – it’s been a struggle just to get attention. Opus Research’s model for CAT spending grows from about $600 million in 2005 to roughly $1.6 billion in 2009. If you add another billion in outsourced VoiceXML-based interactive voice response, spending on CAT tops $2.5 billion. For the same time period, Gartner sees spending on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based Web services growing from over $14 billion to $189 billion.

Investment in emerging architectures accounts for significant spending, where the major objects of expenditure carry names like enterprise service bus (ESB) on the enterprise side and the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) for carriers and service providers. In the name of promoting mobile applications and multimodal delivery of services, businesses are expected to spend something on the order of $49 billion in 2005. CAT’s mission during these Terrible 2000’s is to build a clearer link with such spending initiatives.

Several other technologies have grown to dwarf ‘pure’ CAT. IP telephony infrastructure will reach $3 billion in 2005 and that ‘three billion’ threshold represents the milestone where emerging IT and telecommunications technologies assume sufficient gravitas to be taken seriously. This heavyweight status has been attained by providers of enterprise resources planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), business process outsourcing (BPO) and mobility.

CAT’s Checkered Present
The picture of CAT’s success is a mosaic – both skill and art are required to fit pieces into disparate parts of emerging infrastructures in a pleasing way. During the past few years, CAT-based solutions have built a bad reputation for being too expensive and complicated to deploy. The pre-requisite for addressing complexity is to add developer friendly tools, hooks and connectors to existing data and business intelligence, and other ‘reusable’ components, including ‘widgets’ or others pieces of programs (objects) that shorten development times. Implementation of these elements will allow CAT to better interact with the outside world.

Success occurs on a case-by-case basis and, as is characteristic of any problem child, comes with the help of third party influencers. In the near term, the greatest influence comes from providers of professional services, including software developers, system integrators and business process outsourcers. Indeed, over half of the spending on CAT-based solutions will go toward professional services and maintenance, which follows the overall IT industry’s pattern of spending.

By this decade’s end, today’s ‘novel’ applications will become routine and, indeed, codified. CAT practitioners will benefit from a ‘take-n-bake’ or ‘paint-by-numbers’ approach as ‘widgets’ and ‘go-fasters’ shorten the time it takes to deploy new applications. CAT will be able to take advantage of a library of best practices encapsulated in Java code, that are the product of years of implementations. OpenSpeech Dialogs (OSDs) from voice specialist Nuance and reusable dialog components (RDCs) from IT giant IBM are examples of the growing codebase that lives at ‘the abstraction layer’ of CAT architecture.

Making Hay in Bundles
CAT is important to technology and service vendors because it represents several pockets of high growth in an IT world where aggregate spending will grow in single digits per annum over the next three years. In Opus Research’s study of telecommunications services providers around the globe, we uncovered 35% growth in the number of deployments of speech-enabled applications. In a world where top line revenue for wireless services providers has started to flatten and fixed line services are generally regarded as a lost cause, this should be cause for celebration.

Growth in CAT has been fueled by the inexorable migration from switched telephone networks to IP-based communications, which creates the kinds of uncertainty that ‘solution providers’ can use to make hay – or, more accurately, ‘bundles’ of hay.

If you’re looking for an industry-wide action that exemplifies the spirit of cooperation required to build better bundles, regard how the leading providers of application server software have rallied around Web services. For example, IBM, BEA, Oracle, SAP, Sybase and Iona joined together to foster a single ‘Service Component Architecture’ to provide well-defined interoperability standards so developers can focus on writing applications and business logic that are then bundled into IT infrastructure regardless of the middleware that is already in place. In other words, the individual technology providers transcend their classic monolithic architectures to make themselves ‘bundle friendly’.

Big Blue’s Bundle-Friendly Approach
Speaking of IBM, under the tutelage of Bruce Morse, Vice President of IBM’s Contact Center Solutions, IBM bundled its WebSphere applications server and middleware with development tools and speech processing resources that are the product of decades of development within Big Blue. Morse spent much of his time forging partnerships with the leaders in the routing and CTI (computer-telephone interface) layers, specifically Genesys Labs, Avaya and Cisco to craft a platform that would fit into multi-vendor environments while appealing to a broad spectrum of application developers and system integrators.

Morse’s approach conforms to the strategy outlined by Steve Mills, the executive in charge of all IBM Software development. For several years, IBM has put emphasis on deploying standards and, in many cases, support of ‘Open Source’ versions of key software platforms, most conspicuously the Linux operating system, but more recently the Eclipse development environment and Cloudscape database management system as well as the reusable dialog components (RDCs) mentioned above. These are community-building efforts.

In 2006, look for IBM to make CAT even more partner friendly by moving the entire Contact Center portfolio, including WebSphere Voice Server (WVS) and all components that comprise Contact Center solidly into the SOA-driven WebSphere portfolio. Marie Wieck, vice president of IBM’s WebSphere Software group, takes charge of solutions and partnerships, which will ensure that the bundles of hardware, software, middleware and services are presented in a way that is consistent with the open, multimodal approach that IBM is pursuing across its Software Group.

The tactics that will take CAT through the next five years are exemplified by IBM’s internal positioning. Big Blue is not alone in making sure that ‘conversational access’ spans multiple modalities and multi-vendor environments. While it was necessary to focus on contact centers, where speech-based interactions and interactive voice response is concentrated, Microsoft, Oracle, BEA and even speech specialist Nuance are rushing to broaden the wingspan to cross traditional boundaries between contact centers and enterprise networks or between premises-based and hosted solutions.

CAT, the prototypical problem child, must shed its long-time identity (a close link to IVR and contact centers); lose the ‘loner’ approach of highly specialized solutions; and adopt the mannerisms of old-guard IT solutions. That will be key to turning the Terrible 2000s into the Marvelous Millenium.

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