Paul Magee, Australia and New Zealand country manager for VeCommerce said the partnership will combine Genesys' expertise in the area of computer and telephony integration with SpeechWorks' speech recognition engine and VeCommerce's speech applications development.
"For VeCommerce the benefits are quite significant, we already have the lion share of the enterprise market, and working with Geneys and SpeechWorks will give us a platform to develop the carrier market," Magee said signalling his intent to ramp up sales in the telco sector.
Other speech integrators have given the deal a cautious welcome, taking a wait-and-see approach.
"Any large joint-venture will strengthen the market for the deployment of speech applications," said a spokesman speech technology integrator Pyxis Technology. "This kind of cooperation will also stimulate developments in the sector which can only be good for the industry as a whole."
According to Peter Chidiac, SpeechWorks Australia and New Zealand country manager, the partnership will see the roll-out of an open standards based speech recognition product which supports SpeechWorks technology.
However, the advent of open standards and increasing prevalence of VXML come with mixed blessing for integrators such as VeCommerce, as this new approach threatens to undermine many of their proprietary developments.
While the new partners claim customers stand to benefit from improved integration, between different products Stephen Coates, communications consultant specialising in speech recognition, said prospective customers will focus on the solutions rather than vendor relationships.
"Anyone buying into the technology will want to integrate any new technology with what they already have in operation," said Coates. "I expect the response to the partnership to be quite muted."
Coates also suggested the deal may raise the ire of integrators and applications developers already working with Genesys technology, SpeechWorks competitors, whose relationship with VeCommerce may come under pressure as a result of today's announcement.
Genesys is the leading CTI provider in Australia, holding 37 percent of the computer and telephony integration market, according to a report published by communications consultants, Occidental Communications. However, this degree of market share may lead to conflicts that threaten the stability of the new pact.
"Aside from VeCommerce, Genesys' technology is sold by many other companies, and it will be interesting to see what their reaction is to the deal," said Coates.
Its all BS - Cheating and fly by night schemes..
Never kept their words