Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Nuance Continues to Grow with Acquisition of Consulting and Systems Integration Firm Viecore

October 22, 2007

Just days after announcing its plan to acquire Vocada, Inc., a supplier of critical test result management (CTRM) solutions, Nuance Communications, Inc. today announced its plan to acquire Viecore Inc., a consulting and systems integration firm specializing in the deployment of contact center solutions for large enterprises.


Nuance has been on a tear lately, growing its business at a rapid pace through strategic acquisitions and forging new partnerships with high profile tech companies. In August the company announced that it had completed its acquisition of Tegic Communications Inc., a developer of embedded software for mobile devices (and a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc.'s AOL), and also announced the acquisition of VoiceSignal Technologies, Inc., a developer pf speech technologies for mobile devices. And earlier this month the company announced its acquisition of Commissure Inc., a medical imaging software company that provides speech-enabled radiology workflow optimization and data analysis solutions.

With the acquisition of Viecore, Nuance will be able to greatly expand its consulting and systems integration services and better serve its customers in the telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, utilities and government sectors. Viecore’s contact center expertise, deep industry vertical knowledge and speech capabilities will enable Nuance to combine and integrate multiple technologies for the contact center, as well as the ability to deliver the full range of services required to plan, design, develop, deploy, integrate and optimize enterprise speech solutions.

The deal will also broaden Nuance by enabling it to implement and optimize a full range of contact center solutions, including caller interaction services using speech and touchtone, computer telephony integration (CTI), agent desktop and reporting solutions and systems integration. Viecore’s Federal Systems division, which will enable Nuance to leverage stringent software development practices and standards for government solutions, sweetens the pot even further.

The deal will also strengthen Nuance’s relationships with its partners -- many of whom have already been doing business with Viecore -- including Avaya and Genesys. These partners can now work with one team to more comprehensively meet the needs of their customers.

Viecore’s existing customer include Aetna, AIG, Bank of America, Delta, DHL, GE, Hertz, Horizon BCBS, National Grid, Prudential, Sears, Wellpoint and Wells Fargo. The company’s professional services organization offers an experienced multi-platform integration team, delivering a more comprehensive contact center experience to reinforce Nuance’s core speech solutions expertise.

“The growing acceptance of speech solutions in contact centers has resulted in accelerating network speech sales, where growth exceeded 25 percent in the most recent quarter,” said Wes Hayden, newly-crowned president of the Nuance Enterprise division, in a press release. “Increasingly last year, we received requests from our enterprise customers for us to take responsibility for the integration of core speech technology and applications with their enterprise systems. The demand for larger, more comprehensive enterprise speech solutions requires deeper and broader consulting and implementation services. Businesses can now work with a single, trusted provider to meet their end-to-end delivery needs for the speech-enabled contact center.”

Thomas Chisholm, president and CEO of Viecore, added, “by combining our contact center services expertise, speech experience and complete solution delivery process with Nuance’s comprehensive customer experience focus, we’re better positioned to drive superior enterprise-level service solutions.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close within the next 30 days.

For more information, visit www.nuance.com and www.viecore.com.

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Patrick Barnard is Associate Editor for Customer Interaction Solutions magazine and Assignment Editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.



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