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10th December 2003 - The US Interactive Voice
Response (IVR) market had its third down year
in a row, losing over 12% in US port sales. 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.
The timing of the economic downturn could not
have been any worse for the IVR market.
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Many companies replaced their IVR systems due to Y2K
upgrades, rather than waiting for a few more years to
do so, diminishing sales through 2002. 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.
This Market Alert is drawn from the In-Stat/MDR report,
"IVR
Market Still Shaking Off its Y2K Hangover",
which provides a comprehensive overview of the Interactive
Voice Response market.
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