Siemens ICN EN, Intervoice in strategic alliance

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to this effect was signed in Dubai by Edwin De Clercq, Managing Director of Intervoice (Middle East & Africa) and Mario De Roos, General Manager - ICN EN, Siemens LLC. The new agreement will facilitate the two entities to take a huge chunk of the growing voice solutions market, currently estimated at US$200 million.

Mr. De Roos explained that as a result of this alliance, Siemens ICN EN will be able to provide Professional Services on Intervoice¡¦s solutions throughout the Middle East, serving a wide range of businesses including service segments, financial establishments, utility service providers and telecommunications companies.

¡§By combining our efforts to provide a whole range of solutions to the voice telephony market, we will be able to provide Consulting and Implementation services in this region with an integrated suite of voice applications, including the IP Ready HiPATH and ProCenter suite of Contact Center Solutions,¡¨ said Mario De Roos.

Siemens will play an active role as systems integrator for the new service that includes application development, customisation and integration, with solutions based on Intervoice¡¦s award winning Omvia Voice Framework, the most open voice solutions environment in the market. With Omvia Voice Framework enterprises can develop Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) applications based on emerging open standards such as VoiceXML and SALT, or with Intervoice¡¦s classic solution environment, IQTalk. Central to this framework is InVision,,¥ Studio, a feature rich graphical development environment from Intervoice.

Another noteworthy development from Siemens for the enterprises in the Middle East is the approach of delivering mission critical projects on a fixed time, fixed price model. This approach delivers rapid benefit to businesses in terms of a quantified measurement of return from IT investments thereby having a positive bottom line impact. By leveraging this model, Siemens is well positioned to execute projects in the Middle East within the domain of CRM, which includes Call Centers and Customer Interaction Channels.

Hailing the collaboration as a step in the right direction for the region¡¦s emerging call centre industry, Edwin De Clercq of Intervoice explained that the new agreement will further reinforce the leading position of both Siemens as a systems integrator and Intervoice as a provider of world-class speech technology.

¡§This partnership further enhances the long standing global relationship between Intervoice and Siemens ICN and will no doubt have a significant impact into the rapidly growing converged speech and data markets in the region. Corporations today are seeking fully integrated voice and data solutions based on the convenience of speech recognition and the added benefit of open standards architecture¡¨ said Edwin De Clercq.