InStat/MDR optimistic on IVR market

The US Interactive Voice Response (IVR) market had its third down year in a row, losing over 12% in US port sales. According to In-Stat/MDR, this market was down again partly due to the lagging Y2K hangover, but primarily because of the continuing slow economy. However, the high-tech market research firm believes that the market will improve modestly during 2003, with larger gains coming in 2004 and beyond. Although the market was down more in 2002 than in 2001, three vendors were able to achieve gains in the tough economy. With sales of 7,685 ports, Syntellect exceeded 2001 numbers by 18.5%. The gain is primarily attributable to strong add-on ports sales. # Interactive Intelligence is fairly new to the IVR market and beat 2001 sales of 2,972 ports by 15.2%. It should be noted that these were for standalone IVR sales only. They would have done even better had we been able to accurately account for IVR ports included in Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) system sales. Nortel beat their 2001 numbers by 4.7%, with sales of 67,178 ports.