The acquisition allows eYak to deliver voice technologies, products, and services to a wide range of customers including channel partners, enterprises, and service providers.The combined offerings will enable these customers to develop and deploy massively scalable, highly reliable, and robust converged communication solutions.
The acquisition couples eYak’s industry-leading SoftTelephony technology with Brooktrout Software’s award-winning graphical application development environments – Show N Tel and ActiveCall – and consulting services. This combination extends eYak’s reach into the rapidly emerging voice services market. IDC research indicates that the net voice services market is expected to grow over 200% annually from $208 million in 2000 to $16 billion by the end of 2004. In addition, according to The Kelsey Group, a convergence of factors, including the Internet, advances in speech recognition technologies, and the expansion of wireless communication, will trigger expenditures related to the voice-enabled Web and voice applications that will reach $41 billion by the end of 2005.
David Friend, eYak’s co-founder, will be the chairman and chief executive officer of the combined company, and Mark Flanagan, the former president and CEO of Brooktrout Software, has been named president and chief operating officer. Jeff Flowers, eYak’s other co-founder, will be the combined company’s chief technology officer.
We believe that customers want solutions, not just technology, said David Friend, CEO and co-founder of eYak. Whether it’s a voice-enabled commerce system that lets you buy movie tickets or make airline reservations, a call-center application that identifies, qualifies and routes callers, a voice portal that allows a mobile workforce to access critical customer information anytime/anywhere, or a telephone self-service application, the customer just wants a system that is finished on time and on budget, is highly scalable and maintainable, is easily modified and upgraded, and is built with an eye on the future, not yesterday’s technology.
With this acquisition, we can deliver to third party developers and our channel partners everything they need to succeed in this rapidly emerging voice services market, Friend continued. Brooktrout Software brings us a graphical application development environment that has won more industry awards than any other, a consulting services organization that knows how to design, develop, deploy, and maintain an end-to-end solution for customers, a great customer base that includes a lot of household names, and a substantial and rapidly growing revenue stream. By combining our massively scalable IP media servers with Brooktrout Software’s development tools, we are well positioned for leadership in the converged communication market. Our engineers are already working hand-in-hand to integrate our products. This acquisition will be good for our combined customer base, our stockholders, and Brooktrout, Inc., who will have an ongoing interest in the success of this business.
This is a wonderful opportunity for both eYak and Brooktrout Software, said Eric Giler, president of Brooktrout, Inc. Over the past three years, Brooktrout Software has developed into a leading provider of converged communication software and services for the enterprise. Although this market opportunity is not central to our own core business, it’s a significant one. The joining of eYak and Brooktrout Software melds complimentary companies and enables them to become a full service provider to developers who are striving to deliver converged applications.
About eYak, Inc.
eYak is a leading provider of IP media server software and solutions for voice applications. The company pioneered the concept of SoftTelephony: IP-based carrier class voice and speech services running on Intel processors, eliminating the need for specialized telephony cards. The SoftTelephony Server enables service providers and application developers to deliver massively scalable, highly reliable, and robust services ranging from reservationless conferencing to telephone-enabled IM, speech-enabled web browsing to wireless group calling. eYak licenses its SoftTelephony Server software elements on a worldwide basis and provides a range of additional services that accelerate time-to-market and lower operating costs. Founded in 1999, eYak is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.
