In a development that presages accelerated marketing of voicemail-to-text transcription, Ditech Networks has forged an agreement that will make it the exclusive marketing and sales channel for Simulscribe’s “wholesale” voice-to-text applications and resources to communications service providers and enterprises. In our forthcoming “Mobile Speech” report, Opus Research has a revenue model for “subscription services” including voicemail transcription growing from roughly $40 million today to about $100 million in five years. That estimate could be conservative, if the process of recruiting global carriers is successful.

Simulscribe will continue to market voicemail-to-text services directly to end-users under the PhoneTag brand.

A report in Techcrunch placed the value of the transaction at but it just signed an exclusive partnership agreement with Ditech Networks that could be worth as much as $17 million (including $7 million cash upfront). It also notes that SimulScribe’s CEO James Siminoff will join Ditech Networks as chief strategy officer of Ditech.

Siminoff has long asserted that the company is both profitable and fast growing. Estimates place its revenue at approximately $4 million annually, with most users opting to subscribe to the service on a monthly basis, offering a “basic” subscription of $9.95/month for 40 messages or an “unlimited” plan is $30/mo for “unlimited”). Otherwise, it charges $0.35 per transcription. According to the TechCrunch article, PhoneTag has about 20,000 paying subscribers, and “reaches about 80,000 more subscribers through wholesale partnerships with Vonage and British Telecom.”

Going forward, Ditech Networks will take charge of those existing wholesale relationships and it expects to forge many more. It should be able to leverage existing vendor relationships with carriers around the globe. It has successfully integrated and marketed both noise reduction and media processing platforms to both wireless and wireline carriers. In our forthcoming “Mobile Speech” report, Opus Research has a revenue model for “subscription services” including voicemail transcription growing from roughly $40 million today to about $100 million in five years. That estimate could be conservative, if the process of recruiting global carriers is successful.

In a separate, but related story in the voicemail-to-text marketplace, reports confirm that investors in high-profile service provider SpinVox are looking for an exit strategy and that the company may be “up for sale.” It is hard to know exactly what’s for sale and how it might be valued. The company reportedly raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors and is not believed to be profitable (with roughly $10 million in revenue).

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