West’s acquisition of Holly Connects was announced roughly two weeks ago, but is expected to close on June 1. Because West already has one of the largest “cloud-based” deployments of the Holly platform, it would be hard to characterize the purchase as “disruptive”. Instead, we see it as the formalization of a close relationship that puts West Interactive on a par with key competitors that already offer clients and prospects the option to implement solutions and applications that straddle on-premises solutions, as well as resources “in the cloud.”

From its inception, Voxeo has offered its clients and application developers versions of its Prophecy platform that can be licensed an implemented “on premises” or sold on a “pre-minute” basis on a “Platform as as Service” (PaaS) basis. With its acquisition of Intervoice, Convergys has added premises-based solutions to a portfolio that includes hosted IVR, CRM and access to live agents. Microsoft is another major player in ‘private cloud/public cloud” arena, as it leverages a strategic equity investment in Aspect, along with its full-on purchase of Tellme Networks, to give its clients, prospects and go-to-market partners a lot pricing schemes and implementation strategies.

Holly Connects also brings West greater global presence. The company was founded almost ten years ago in Australia. Aussie telco Telstra s its largest and one of its longest-standing clients. In Australia, it has demonstrated the ability to scale rapidly and add new capabilities and applications built on IP-Telephony and Web-based standards (especially VoiceXML). In our briefing, West made it clear that it is retaining all of the Holly Connects employees and keeping offices open in Sydney and Melbourne, as well as offices in London (serving Western Europe), in addition to Holly’s headquarters in Boston, MA.

By our calculation, West is the largest hosted IVR provider in the world. It claims over 140,000 “ports” in service, across three different “platforms”, including its original, proprietary environment; and an Alcatel/Genesys environment (originally VoiceGenie, but moving to GVP 8), in addition to Holly Connects. The acquisition of Holly signals that West is ready to migrate many of the legacy apps that now run on its proprietary platform over to Holly’s standards-based environment. At the same time, it will be targeting Holly’s standards-based solutions to large enterprises that will benefit from flexible implementation options and adherence to Web standards.

West continues to run the GVP (Genesys Voice Platform) as well as the Genesys core CIM (Customer Interaction Management) software, for CTI-based call routing. Customers that come in through “leads” Alcatel/Genesys will be implemented in the Genesys environment, which is well-suited to support multi-location enterprises.

Thanks to long-standing work with Telstra, Holly Connects has been designed to support “multi-tenancy” from its inception. That’s an ace-in-the-hole for West as it offers multiple implementation options to both existing customers and new prospects. Indeed, West has a very competitive set of implementation options for large enterprises and carriers. The core is voice apps, but it has added conferencing (which some competitors call “collaboration”), outbound notifications and nascent efforts to support mobile and social applications.

In the RC (Recombinant Communications) world, West and its direct competitors are moving into areas with a number of non-traditional competitors. For instance, Telstra’s fellow incumbent carrier, BT, looks like it will lean on Ribbit and its innovators to bring new applications into the cloud. Likewise, Voxeo will use Tropo and the Voxeo Labs as a mechanism to reach out to a broader base of change agents in a world of more open, cloud-based telephony apps.

A tighter relationship with Holly gives it the opportunity to capitalize on the commitment to standards and baked in IP and SIP-based routing. But other competitors, most notably Voxeo (with Tropo and Voxeo Labs) has encouraged the participation of a broader community of developers. Even the venerable AT&T has stepped up its appeal for Web developers to apply themselves to new speech-enabled services.

West has work to do in both the mobile and social domains. The company will find that the likes of Nuance On Demand (formerly BeVocal) and other customer care specialists. Mobile customers will be the primary beneficiaries as investment steps up in multimodal and multi-channel care.

Categories: Articles

Tags: VoiceXML, IVR, hosted services, Recombinant Communications