Interactive Intelligence to Launch Cloud-based Communications Trial Program

Interactive Intelligence, a provider of unified IP business communications solutions, today launched a trial program called Quick Spin that enables organizations to sample for free the company's communications-as-a-service (CaaS) offering.

The Interactive Intelligence CaaS offering provides cloud-based communications applications for contact centers and enterprises, along with flexible deployment models for migrating between cloud, on-premises, and hybrid configurations. Through a unique local control model, customers keep their own telco lines, calls, and recordings on servers and network at their own locations. Interactive Intelligence maintains separate virtualized servers for each customer, "providing added isolation and increased data security,"  says Joe Staples, chief marketing officer at Interactive Intelligence.

The Interactive Intelligence Quick Spin program will be delivered via a Web portal, enabling organizations to quickly set up interactive voice response menus, skills-based routing, call flows, real-time speech analytics, and more. Interactive Intelligence has six CaaS data centers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and Japan.

"We designed Quick Spin so organizations can more easily conduct their due diligence process as they consider migrating to a cloud-based communications solution," Staples says. "The beauty of the program is that configuration is straightforward—organizations can get up and running in as little as 30 minutes— yet users still get to sample the many sophisticated CaaS applications we offer, such as skills-based routing, real-time word spotting, supervisory monitoring, a feature-rich Web client, and extensive reporting."

The Quick Spin program will be offered later this year. Program terms include a user qualification process, limited trial period, and deployment size parameters. The free trial is good for 2,500 minutes over 14 days and can include up to 10 users in three workgroups and five skill sets. Users can run up to 10 keywords or phrases through the speech analytics engine that's also included.

Quick Spin features are a sub-set of those included with the Interactive Intelligence CaaS offering and are designed to give trial users a taste of the full functionality of the company's hosted services. Interactive Intelligence CaaS features include virtually all of the vendor's premises-based functionality, such as enterprise telephony, auto-attendant, presence, desktop call control, IVR, multichannel routing, reporting and analytics, unified messaging, and conferencing.

"This is a taste of what we offer; it's not the full-blown functionality," Staples says. "Over time, we will continue to offer more of the functionality of our premises-based solution into our CaaS solution."

"We designed our CaaS offering to address customer needs for flexibility, control, security, and reliability," Staples said. "Our Quick Spin program builds on these benefits by giving organizations the kind of hands-on experience that will further maximize the success of their migration to cloud-based communications."

Interactive Intelligence has seen that migration grow. Its CaaS revenue grew 58 percent in the first six months of this year, and orders grew 146 percent in the same time period, according to Staples.

"Our cloud-based business is growing much faster than our premises business," he says. "The market is shifting because [cloud deployments] allow users to focus on their customers rather than on internal IT resources."

Other benefits include greater flexibility, little or no up-front costs, quicker access to new features and functionality, more elastic pricing, according to Staples.

Early pilots of the CaaS offering were conducted at New Era Tickets and Philips Healthcare.