The 2011 Market Leaders
SPEECH ANALYTICS
The Market
Having reached full maturity with, in some cases, almost immediate return on investment results, speech analytics has enjoyed explosive growth. Ovum predicts that the market will be worth $180 million by 2014—which would double the value in 2009. The expansion is being fueled by what is a full-blown analytics revolution in customer relationship management. Analytics technology has finally reached a point where it is consistently producing high-quality, actionable results, and companies are rushing in to make use of it. Growth was also spurred in part by the recession that began in 2008, when an increasing number of companies began looking to analytics suites to drive real-time decision making, hoping to get the most efficient results from every customer.
The Leaders
Nice Systems managed to fight its way out of the Vendor Contender category and into one of the top spots this year. Indeed, the company posted a strong showing across the board, with high grades in depth of functionality, customer satisfaction, and accuracy. Nice’s only stumble occurred in ease of installation.
Nevertheless, Nice might see some additional growth. This year, the company spent approximately $60 million to purchase CyberTech International—a compliance recording solutions vendor. With that acquisition, Nice expects to deepen its penetration into the financial sector as well as enhance the company’s position in medical compliance applications.
Just barely beaten by this year’s winner was Verint, which earned very good scores. The company saw the best depth of functionality numbers among our leaders, the best accuracy score of all vendors, and very strong numbers in ease of installation and use.
However, its price tag held Verint back from winning overall; Verint’s cost scores were the lowest of any of the vendors in the running this year. To put that into perspective, Verint’s score was only half a point lower than the winner, Nexidia. You get what you pay for, the company would undoubtedly argue.
Verint has been busy this year refreshing its offerings with a new release of Audiolog in April and a new version of its Voice of the Customer Analytics suite in May. We’ll have to wait until next year to see whether those introductions will be enough to allow Verint to overtake the long-reigning champion.
The Winner
This year’s winner will surprise no one. For the fifth consecutive year, Nexidia has taken the top award in speech analytics, squeaking past its rivals by fractions of a point. Nexidia’s success was due largely to a very strong showing in accuracy and cost. In fact, our panel of analysts and consultants gave Nexidia top marks in cost among the leaders, along with the highest customer satisfaction scores. The results suggest that Nexidia’s top ranking overall may have a lot to do with the value it offers for the money.
The company has doubtlessly been helped this year by the $23 million equity infusion that Nexidia received at the end of last year. Among the new investors was BlueCross/BlueShield, which is a client of Nexidia. In 2011, Nexidia also expanded its reach into Hollywood and television with the launch of PhraseFind, an application packaged with Avid Media Composer for finding key phrases among the sometimes thousands of hours of footage taken for a single project of documentary or reality programming.
Likewise, Nexidia has thrust itself into jurisprudence with a pair of partnerships that brings the company’s tools more firmly into the world of litigation audio discovery.
Vendor Contender
Competition for Vendor Contender was fierce this year, as vendors duked it out over tenths of a point. When the dust had settled, Autonomy etalk’s superior depth of functionality and customer satisfaction carried the day. Autonomy also sported some fairly decent cost scores, second only to Nexidia among the leaders.
—Eric Barkin
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