Convergys Receives Frost & Sullivan Award for Innovation in Voice Recognition

Frost and Sullivan named Convergys  the recipient of its 2005 Award for Technology Innovation in the field of voice recognition technologies.

Frost and Sullivan presents the Technology Innovation Award each year to a company whose research has resulted in innovations that bring significant contributions to the industry.  To choose the Award recipient, Frost and Sullivan tracked innovation in key technology markets and conducted extensive research and interviews.

Frost and Sullivan chose Convergys because of SpeechPort, the company's VoiceXML-based, open hosted platform for speech applications.  SpeechPort is standards-based, and provides telephony access in addition to speech recognition and text-to-speech resources capable of simultaneously supporting thousands of callers.

"Using the SpeechPort platform, Convergys has developed offerings that are differentiated from those of industry peers by virtue of their patented open hosting, exceptional security features, and secure and geographically redundant facilities with 24x7 monitoring," said Frost and Sullivan's V.R. Yoges.

Frost and Sullivan's Technology Innovation Award is bestowed upon a company (or individual) that has carried out new research; which has resulted in innovation(s) that have or are expected to bring significant contributions to the industry in terms of adoption, change, and competitive posture.  This award recognizes the quality and depth of a company's research and development program as well as the vision and risk-taking that enabled it to undertake such an endeavor.

To choose the award recipient, Frost and Sullivan's analyst team tracks innovation in key hi-tech markets.  The selection process includes primary participant interviews and extensive primary and secondary research via the bottom-up approach.  The analyst team shortlists candidates on the basis of a set of qualitative and quantitative measurements.  The analyst also considers the pace of research and technology innovation and the significance or potential relevance of the innovation to the overall industry.  The ultimate award recipient is chosen after an evaluation of this research.

In addition of the methodology described above, there are specific criteria used to determine the final rankings.  The recipient of this award has excelled based on one or more of the following criteria:

• Significance of the innovation(s) in the industry, and across industries (if applicable)
• Potential of the products of innovation(s) to become industry standard(s)
• Competitive advantage of innovation vis-à-vis other related ones
• Impact (or potential impact) of innovation(s) on company or industry mindshare and/or company bottom line
• Breadth of intellectual property related to the innovation(s), i.e. patents, scientific publications, papers in peer reviewed journals.