Voxeo Talks

Voxeo announced today that the company made the “Top 100 Best Companies to Work for in Florida” list. As a marketing professional, I was happy to hear the good news and excited to share it. As a Voxeo employee, I wasn’t at all surprised. My colleagues and I have the good fortune to experience first hand what makes Voxeo a great place to work.

“Voxeons” tend to be highly enthusiastic about their jobs and this is a big part of why the work environment is so remarkable. Voxeo’s open-air office setup facilitates frequent communication and project collaboration. The fact that we share a common mission to create, market, sell and support a superior product further contributes to a consistently high energy level. And then there’s our 99% customer retention rate – a statistic in which we take great pride. 

Of course the power of great benefits and perks can’t be underestimated.  There are the little things – like our Friday lunch buffet and the Voxeo café, which is staffed by a talented barista and stocked with an abundance of snacks.  Because we have fun together, there are company parties and family outings like our trip to the Kennedy Space Center and our annual 4th of July party. And because at least 80% of us (if not more) are techies, Voxeons rank the fact that employees are outfitted with the best equipment, including MacBook Pros and iPhones, high up on the list of benefits. So what’s at the top? For me it’s 100% paid healthcare for the entire family and the flexibility I need to successfully balance work and family.

So, while I wasn’t surprised about Voxeo making the list, I was incredibly excited and proud to see the company recognized for its efforts in cultivating a great workplace. The news is in the August issue of Florida Trend and online at www.FloridaTrend.com. Voxeo underwent a two-part selection process that included an evaluation of workplace policies, practices, philosophy, systems and demographics, as well as an employee satisfaction survey. The combined scores determined the top companies.

“Having started companies in Silicon Valley, New York, and Orlando, I know first-hand the great advantages Florida and its citizens offer to rapidly growing entrepreneurial companies,” said Jonathan Taylor, Voxeo’s CEO. “Voxeo’s philosophy is to attract and retain the brightest minds in Florida and to recruit talent to Florida from around the world. This award is particularly meaningful because it recognizes the talents and contributions of our employees — incredible people who make Voxeo a great place to work.”

Click here to read Voxeo’s press release or learn more about working at Voxeo.

Back in August 2008 at the SpeechTEK conference in New York, we were recognized as Speech Technology Magazine’s 2008 Market Leader in the Speech Self-Service Suite category. As our news release at the time stated:

Speech Technology magazine determines category winners as decided by the editors of Speech Technology magazine and a panel of experts from the academic, consulting, and analyst communities.. Companies were scored in key areas, including customer satisfaction, depth of functionality, company direction, accuracy, cost, and ease of use.

“Recipients of the Speech Technology Magazine’s Speech Industry Awards are recognized for accomplishments that stand out from the crowd,” says David Myron, editorial director of Speech Technology magazine. “They have distinguished themselves through their individual accomplishments, service to the industry and the implementation of truly innovative new applications using speech technology.”

Voxeo’s focus on removing the cost and complexity barriers to speech application adoption and improving the business case for speech applications is cited as the leading reason Voxeo was selected as the Speech Self-Service Suite category leader. Voxeo earned an industry-leading score of 4.5 out of 5.0 for cost and 4.4 out of 5.0 for ease of use. Additionally, the company led the industry with a 4.5 score in customer satisfaction.

In uploading some videos to YouTube recently, I discovered that just last month (April 2009), a video interview from the SpeechTEK show floor with Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor has been posted. Here you can listen to Speech Technology Magazine’s David Myron talk to Jonathan about the award:

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, speechtek, speechtechmagazine, awards, voice, self-service, jonathan taylor

Today we are pleased to announce that industry analyst firm Datamonitor named Voxeo as one of only two vendors on their “shortlist” for enterprise IVR vendors. Datamonitor’s report, titled “Decision Matrix: Selecting an IVR Vendor in the Enterprise” analyzed offerings from Voxeo, Aspect, Avaya, Cisco, Convergys/Intervoice, Genesys and Nortel. In the end, their conclusion was:

“Genesys and Voxeo are in Datamonitor’s ‘shortlist’ category and are considered to be the current leaders in the IVR market. These competitors have received the highest overall scores for the technology assessment and both scored well in the end-user sentiment ratings.”

Given our intense focus on providing Extreme Support and our goal of providing the best platform for developing voice applications, we were also pleased to see this statement:

Voxeo has received some of the highest scores in the end-user sentiment radar, particularly in the areas of service levels, customer support and client engagement. Voxeo achieved top scores for platform features and capabilities as well as development tools.

The report goes into a great amount of detail about all of the vendors – their strengths, weaknesses, capabilities and more. It makes for good reading if you are considering new investments in IVR technology.

But you don’t have to trust us – you can download the Datamonitor report for free and read it yourself.

We have spent a great amount of time, energy and resources on offering customers an outstanding platform upon which to develop IVR, Unified Communications, Self-Service and other voice/communications applications. We are pleased to see that recognized by Datamonitor.

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Technorati Tags: datamonitor, ivr, voxeo, genesys, aspect, avaya, cisco, convergys, intervoice, nortel, communications, voice, self-service

Voxeo is happy to be named a recipient of TMC’s INTERNET TELEPHONY 2008 Product of the Year Award for its on-premise Prophecy Platform and on-demand Prophecy Hosting services. The award recognizes companies that have exhibited innovation and a commitment to excellence in the IP communications marketplace. Prophecy is built on SIP from the ground up and seamlessly integrates with other SIP environments, supporting a wide range of speech-enabled IVR and VoIP applications.

A full list of Product of the Year winners will be published in the February, 2009 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine. You can view it at www.itmag.com.

TMC’s Customer Interaction Solutions magazine has awarded Voxeo their 2008 Speech Technology Excellence Award for Voxeo Prophecy.  The award recognizes companies who have made significant contributions to improving speech applications for their clients.

Voxeo works hard to make it easy for companies to build and deploy innovative speech applications. Prophecy offers built-in English automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech synthesis (TTS) as well as support for leading third-party speech engines. Both the on-premise platform and on-demand hosting services include Designer, our Visio-like, web-based rapid development tool. Designer walks users through simple steps to create VoiceXML IVR or VoIP applications without writing code. Prophecy also comes with open source auto attendant, voicemail and conferencing applications.

The Speech Technology Excellence Award is published in the August 2008 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.

In what I’ve learned has become an annual tradition at SpeechTEK, we released yesterday our “State of Voxeo” news release. The title pretty much says it all: “Voxeo Announces Global Expansion and Record Growth“. Here’s the financial performance part:

From July 2007 to June 2008 Voxeo’s revenue increased 99.7% over the prior twelve months. In North America and Europe revenues grew 94% and 470% respectively. Voxeo’s performance significantly outpaced revenue growth seen by a peer group of eighteen leading public Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, which saw a 48% mean increase in revenues over the same period. Unlike most SaaS vendors, Voxeo grew significantly while maintaining profitability and has now closed 18 consecutive profitable quarters.

Yes, we should have rounded our 99.7% revenue increase up to simply “100%”, but we honestly didn’t think anyone would believe us if we put that in. And yes, that last bit means we have actually been making a profit for the last 4.5 years. (And we also realize that the concept of making money and growing organically through profit is a rather radical idea in these times, but we rather like the idea.)

We also continue to be pleased by the recognition we are receiving within the industry:

In a recent Strategic Focus Report on “Hosted Speech and Outbound IVR Services”, Datamonitor ranked Voxeo as the only company strong across all metrics of the IVR landscape, beating 17 other IVR companies. In February Voxeo announced that Gartner, Inc., a leading research and advisory firm, has “positioned Voxeo in the Visionaries Quadrant of its Magic Quadrant for IVR Systems and Enterprise Voice Portals, 2008 report”. Voxeo’s placement is based on “its ability to execute and completeness of vision.” In June, Voxeo was the recipient of the exclusive Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Innovation for its Prophecy Voice Platform products and services. In July Voxeo won the 2007 Product of the Year award from Communications Solutions. Finally, in August Voxeo won the 2008 Speech Technology Magazine Speech Solution Award for “Best Self-Service Suite”.

Our focus continues to be on delivering the best possible platform for executing voice applications and providing the best possible support to our customers. We’re delighted to see that focus being recognized and do appreciate the kind words being said about us.

The “State of Voxeo” news release also speaks of the great improvements in our Extreme Support program, the number of customers we’ve added and the number of developers who have worked with our product. While I’m not going to copy the entire news release here, given my particular interest in helping build our developer community, I loved seeing this:

In addition, over the past 18 months over 20,000 developers have installed Voxeo’s openly downloadable Prophecy software platform and over 8,000 have joined Voxeo’s Evolution developer program. As of August 2008 over 31,000 developers have joined Evolution.

In these times of economic turmoil, we are thrilled to be able to put out a news release like this… and we remain incredibly thankful and grateful to all of our customers, developers and partners who continue to choose our platform for their voice applications. We look forward to continuing to help our customers grow their businesses and build stronger and better applications that help people communicate. Thanks to you all!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, voice, applications, voip

As we noted in our press release on Tuesday, we were delighted to be one of the recipients of Internet Telephony magazine’s “2007 Product of the Year” awards for our Prophecy product. As we state in the release:

Voxeo Prophecy 8 is the easy-to-install and openly downloadable platform for speech, VoIP and IVR applications. Before Prophecy, most telephony application platforms were complex “cast iron” systems that pre-dated the open era of the web. In stark contrast, Prophecy is built entirely on modern standards including VoiceXML, CCXML and SIP. Prophecy is as easy to install as a piece of consumer software, avoiding expensive on-site vendor installation. Prophecy is free for anyone to try, and is available at http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy.

We thank TMC.Net and look forward to seeing Rich Tehrani and many of the others in the TMC crew down at the Internet Telephony Expo in Miami later his month.

And please do check out Prophecy. You have basically all the incredible power of our hosted Evolution service – only in a version on your own premise!

Technorati Tags: applications, prophecy, awards, rich tehrani, voxeo