West Interactive Acquires TuVox

Two months after its acquisition of Holly Connects, West Interactive has now acquired TuVox, a provider of on-demand speech and interactive voice response applications. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Pam Mortenson, president of West Interactive, says the timing of the deal so close on the heels of the Holly Connects acquisition was purely coincidental. “We began looking for a development tool a number of months back and we came to like Tuvox and felt it brought the most to our business,” she says.

TuVox constructs applications using proprietary development tools that address all aspects of the application lifecycle, from initial design through ongoing operations and tuning. The tool set includes features often sought by clients, including support for the leading VoiceXML platforms, a replaceable runtime component, and a multitenanted administration console for configuration and reporting.

This development tool was one of the key parts of the deal that made Tuvox an attractive prospect, according to Mortenson. The tools, she said, will allow West and its customers to create more applications and speed their time to market. “Certainly there are some legacy applications that we will be looking to move over to VoiceXML as well,” she says.

Nancy Jamison, principal analyst at Jamison Consulting, sees the acquisition as a great opportunity for West to play catch-up. “Because so many of the big telecom players, like Cisco and Genesys, are providing hosting services now, this will allow West to port its stuff over to VoiceXML to remain competitive,” she says

Mortenson also points out that the talented pool of about 40 speech scientists, voice user interface designers, and others added to Tuvox’s value proposition.

“We are extremely impressed with the TuVox staff and their ability to rapidly deploy a high-quality application, even when clients had difficulty articulating their precise requirements,” she says. “We believe this capability, combined with our best-in-class platform and scale, will create a truly unique solution that will be particularly beneficial when working with clients on cutting-edge applications.”

The fact that West has made two key acquisitions in the past few weeks  shows that the company is committed to the speech technology market and its customers, according to Mortenson. “West Interactive is investing in the business and wants to continue to respond to our customers as their business needs change,” she adds.