Traditional IVR looks set to disappear with the emergence of open-standards platforms.
These systems enable businesses to better leverage web infrastructure, improve functionality and potentially graduate to speech technology to further improve routing, transactions and self-service capabilities. According to Datamonitor, spend on traditional IVR licenses will dip from $277 million to $179 million in North America and EMEA by 2009.
Spend on open-standards IVR licenses will grow from $166 million to $332 million in North America and EMEA by 2009. Traditional IVR is based on proprietary languages. As such, maintenance, upgrades and back-end data integration is expensive, complex and causes vendor lock-in.
The emergence of open-standards is a natural evolution for the IVR and will drastically improve the functionality and availability of higher quality phone-based applications in the market. In addition, open-standards IVR platforms liberate businesses from vendor lock-in and enable application portability to other similar open-standards platforms. Datamonitor expects North American and EMEA businesses spend in open-standards IVR platforms to double in the next five years to over $330 million.
Although, at the core, voice-XML and speech application language tags (SALT) enable voice user interface and speech application design, many businesses today are deploying these open-standards IVR platforms with touchtone rather than speech and still leveraging the benefits of open-standards and web development capabilities. However through the next five years, as they become more familiar with Voice-XML and SALT, many will choose to speech-enable their Voice-XML or SALT IVR platforms and deploy speech applications.
Businesses are making more informed decisions on the strategic direction of their IT investments. To this end, a large number are employing a cap-growth strategy when it comes to IVR and speech technology. These businesses are likely to roll-out speech in small deployments to mitigate risk while forming best practices through 2009. The challenge for these progressive businesses making the transition to speech is firmly rooted in the complex nature and high costs associated with speech application design and implementation.
