West Corporation  has made a deal to acquire Holly Connects (News - Alert), which provides carrier-grade voice platforms, for an undisclosed sum. Holly will become part of West's Communications Services segment and will continue to sell its products and services to hosting providers, telecommunications and enterprise clients.

Holly Connects, founded in 2000, pioneered the use of SIP signaling, VoIP telephony, speech recognition technology and the VoiceXML (News - Alert)standard in platform infrastructure for caller self-service. The Holly Voice Platform provides high capacity, solid reliability and extensive multitenancy capabilities; Holly products are deployed by hosting providers, telecommunications carriers and large enterprises worldwide, including West Interactive.

(West Interactive is known worldwide through its listing on the closing credits on the hit TV program Dancing With The Stars; its IVR system handles viewers' called-in votes for their favorite celebrity contestants.)

'Working with Holly Connects for several years, we have been extremely impressed by the performance of their products and dedication of their staff,' said Pam Mortenson, President of West Interactive. 'We view this acquisition as a superb opportunity to complement our current product and services portfolio, allowing West to address a broader market.'

'Many of our hosting clients and prospects have expressed an interest in having West Interactive manage additional, on-premise call traffic and applications to complement our hosting offering,' said Steve Stangl, President of West's Communications Services operating segment. 'Offering them the same Holly Voice Platform software used in our hosted services permits a seamless blending of operations and a natural extension of our professional services.'

Holly Connects has been building out and enhancing its solutions prior to the acquisition. In April it rolled out Holly CTI Gateway (News - Alert), which provides remote access to computer-telephony integration (CTI) services using the standard capabilities found on any VoiceXML or CCXML platform, even those that lack native support for the target CTI (News - Alert)vendor. Holly CTI Gateway is a software-only solution installed only in the enterprise contact center, allowing it to work with applications hosted by any service provider.

'Most CTI architectures are intended for traditional on-premise deployments wholly within a single facility, and so are based on proprietary communications protocols that are not inherently secure,' said Ray Teale, Chief Technology Officer for Holly Connects. 'When calls are processed in a hosted environment but transferred to an on-premise contact center, some method of securing the CTI communications between the two sites is necessary.'

Despite its importance, CTI often has been considered impractical for many hosted IVR applications, says Holly Connects, due to the additional cost and complexity incurred implementing the special firewall configurations, virtual private networks, and leased communications lines typically demanded for security. Holly CTI Gateway employs standard communications protocols that work securely across public networks, translating service requests to the CTI vendor's proprietary protocols only safely within the enterprise. This makes CTI access affordable for any application, reduces dependency on the hosting provider, and improves CTI port sharing efficiency.

Holly CTI Gateway is based on a field-proven framework that delivers carrier-grade scalability, reliability, and application multitenancy. Multiple gateways can be managed remotely through a central web-based console that includes detailed real-time reporting and extensive alarm integration options.

In January Holly Connects released version 5.1 of Holly5, its flagship voice platform software with revamped reporting and analytics capabilities to provide greater versatility, easier customization, and increased speed. New trending reports can track system metrics over minutes, days, or months. New comparison reports can display differences in system metrics based on server, application, or even caller behavior.

The speech technology Holly5.1 supports has been expanded to include the latest products from Cepstral, Loquendo, Nuance (News - Alert)Communications and Vlingo, plus applications that can incorporate utterance re-recognition using multiple grammars to improve accuracy. There are also new configuration options more that more efficiently blend inbound and outbound applications.

At the same time optimized call recording now can be enabled via Holly5.1on all channels while maintaining full system capacity. The platform also features VoiceXML access to SIP header fields, a simplified vendor-agnostic CTI interface an improved whisper transfer facility it says permits a superior caller experience by tightly integrating Holly5 applications with other call processing elements.

'Holly Connects values customer service as the essential element in our corporate culture,' said Lance Berks, CEO of Holly Connects. 'We are pleased to be joining an organization that shares our commitment to client and staff satisfaction, and that can provide the resources needed to accelerate our strategy for growth in North America.'

Brendan B. Read is TMCnet's Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan's articles, please visit his columnist page .

Edited by Patrick Barnard