Readers are aware that the financial results of Interactive Intelligence Group Inc. have been a good barometer for both the company’s performance and industry trends. The company has released its financial results for its third quarter and first nine months, ending September 30, 2015, with a focus on industry trends.
Highlighted results were as follows:
Commenting on the results, Dr. Donald Brown, Interactive Intelligence founder and CEO, said: "The third quarter showed that we are continuing to execute on our strategy to become the leading vendor in the customer engagement market…Increasing cloud subscriptions is an essential part of this strategy, and the impressive jump we saw in the quarter reflected an almost 40 percent year-over-year increase in the number of new cloud customers as well as robust add-on sales. This growth was further driven by our improved cloud implementation processes, which accelerate the time-to-value for customers and the start of our revenue recognition.
"Also core to our strategy is having unrivaled customer engagement technology," Brown continued. "We were the only vendor named a leader by Gartner in both its 2015 Contact Center as a Service, North America1 and Contact Center Infrastructure, Worldwide Magic Quadrants. We believe that organizations will increasingly recognize the importance of having genuine implementation options as they develop systems to interact with their customers. Being the vendor most capable of providing these options significantly strengthens our current and long-term competitive position."
While the company continues to operate at a bit of a loss, the momentum for the cloud really is indicative of the transformation taking place for contact center solutions. Customers of all sizes, regardless of geographic location, are opting to move to the cloud fully or as a hybrid. Having options is critical since it allows customers to gracefully migration without potential business practices and process disruptions. As the same time it leaves the door open for future enhancements. Plus, the alternative business models are also proving attractive.
Digging deeper into the results, the commitment to being a recognized innovator and fierce competitor is shown in the increase in both sales and marketing expense and research and development. Each have increased year-over-year for the comparative three month and nine month periods.
One final industry trend that is of interest: Interactive Intelligence is now describing itself as a customer engagement solutions provider. This industry rebranding from call ‘center solutions’ to ‘contact center and customer interaction center solutions’ and now to ‘customer engagement solutions’ is not mere semantics. It highlights the critical nature of context as a key ingredient for keeping customers happy, loyal, and willing to tell their friends. “Interactions” have always seemed somewhat technical while “engagements” are more personal and emotional. Indeed, it is not too early to say that enhancing engagement will be a big trend for 2016.