With numerous customer wins under its belt already this year, contact center solutions company Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) appears recession-proof.
In a
preliminary earnings report for the three-month period ended June 30, the company, which makes software that helps companies automate customer service and other business processes, announced that it expects revenues of $32 million to $34 million – up from the $31 million it reported for the same quarter last year.
Company founder and CEO, Dr. Donald E. Brown said in a release that Interactive saw growth during its second quarter “in both product and services revenues.” He said the company received three orders more than $1 million, including two from new customers, and another nine orders more than $250,000 each.
“We were pleased to see such customer demand in an environment that continues to be very competitive and filled with economic uncertainty," Brown said.
As per the preliminary report, Interactive Intelligence is anticipating total revenues between $32 million and $34 million, net income on a non-GAAP basis between $4.0 million and $4.7 million, and diluted earnings per share (EPS) on a non-GAAP basis between 22 and 26 cents. The company expects to report GAAP net income between $1.8 million and $2.5 million and EPS between 10 and 14 cents.
Interactive Intelligence sells contact center software and enterprise phone systems. The company’s Customer Interaction Center (CIC) is a comprehensive contact center platform offering IP-PBX (News - Alert), ACD/multimedia queuing, call/screen recording, quality monitoring, workforce management, IVR and self-service automation, agent scoring, multi-site routing, speech and data analytics, customer satisfaction surveys, detailed reporting and more. The platform, which is offered on-premises or as a hosted service, handles multimedia contacts including phone, email, Web chat, fax, IM and video. It also offers advanced unified communications capabilities including “presence,” which is the ability to see the availability and status of others on the network.
The Indianapolis-based outfit claims that most of its customers deploy the CIC platform in the contact center first – but once an organization discovers the cost savings and productivity-enhancing capabilities it brings, they often deploy it across the entire enterprise. The all-IP platform scales from 1,500 to 15,000 users, and company divisions and departments typically see fast return on investment from its advanced multi-site routing and UC capabilities.
The company also offers its Enterprise Interaction Center (EIC) IP PBX software suite, which is geared for companies with 100 to 1,500 users. Because these IP business phone systems are Windows-based, they are fully interoperable with other Microsoft (News - Alert) business applications. The solutions also support full remote and mobile access – meaning workers can access the system from a wide range of mobile computing devices. Interactive also offers, as a standalone product, an advanced voicemail system, Messaging Interaction Center (MIC), which allows to organizations to streamline all messaging on a single standards-based platform.
Interactive Intelligence -- which sponsors the Contact Center Solutions community, as well as the IP Phone System, Voicemail Replacement, VoIP Contact Center and Business Automation channels on TMCnet -- made news recently when it announced that it is developing a new business process automation product, dubbed
Interaction Process Automation (IPA), scheduled for release in Q4. The new offering -- a module that plugs into the CIC platform -- facilitates what is being called “communications-based process automation.” Basically it enables companies to use the multimedia routing and presence capabilities of the CIC platform as a framework for carrying out routine, daily business processes.
The new offering will include support for documents in a wide range of formats -- in addition to the multimedia contacts the platform supports currently. Facilitating the document management piece is the software Interactive Intelligence acquired when it bought Columbia, SC-based software company AcroSoft in May.
According to company officials, AcroSoft's document management software, which was created for the insurance industry, will be integrated into the IPA product, and this is what will enable document sharing. This foray into business process automation marks a significant change in strategy for the company. Not only will this greatly broaden its customer base, it will also expand the number of industries and verticals the company serves. What’s more it will put Interactive in competition with other business process automation leaders, including Oracle, IBM (News - Alert), Savvion and SAP.
Interactive Intelligence plans to release final second quarter financial results July 30. In addition company officials will host a conference call at 4:30 p.m. EDT, July 30. Interested parties can dial 1-877-545-1490.
Although it has seen slimmer profit margins recently, Interactive Intelligence has been remarkably resilient in this down economy. In 2008 the company reportedly licensed its solutions to 366 new customers, a record figure.