Voxeo continues to build out the company’s unified communications strategy and portfolio with the acquisition of ClackPoint, a real-time multi-media collaboration platform, that is both simple and easy to deploy, and inexpensive compared to traditional standalone conferencing/collaboration offerings. ClackPoint’s platform is currently being used by over 100,000 people each month to connect and collaborate in social networks, casual connections and business.
At the annual IBM Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Florida, NEC Corporation of America (NEC), announced UNIVERGE® Sphericall® for IBM Lotus Foundations. This is a UC solution that is fully integrated with IBM Lotus Foundations; an appliance that extends IBM Lotus Sametime UC and collaboration (UC2) tools with the ability to connect to telephony functions.
Now that I have weighed in on what happened in 2009, what will happen in 2010? Here is what I think will be hot in 2010 in speech -
Hosted Applications
Hosting is going to stay hot. With companies such as Voxeo, Microsoft Tellme, Contact Solutions, Angel.com, and myriad others providing hosting as an adjunct or alternative to premises-based speech deployments, customers have a lot of safe choices for not having to do everything themselves. No longer an anomaly, I believe that we will see hosting brought up in conversation in the majority of deals in 2010, even if it’s only talked about.
I didn’t personally do a speech technology prediction column at the beginning of 2009, but one of my colleagues at Speech Technology Magazine did. Eric Barkin wrote a feature article, entitled, 2009: What the New Year Will Bring, in which he talks about the effects of the economy on speech technologies, and on some of the predictions for speech from some of my analyst colleagues. It’s debatable whether the economy has gotten that much better in a year, but that didn’t stop the speech industry from moving ahead. Harvesting nuggets from Eric’s column, here are the predictions from that column, followed by what I think did happen in his categories, along with some others that didn’t make it on his list, but made headlines in 2009 nonetheless.
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