Lattice Bridge has plans to offer its solutions through the channel after
going direct to its customers for the past five years. However, more than
systems integrators (SIs) it will train its sights on the office automation
integrators for assembling their solutions with VoIP and IPBX systems.
"We are taking a calculated risk in going through the office automation
integrators than SIs, because we also believe that their commitment will be
higher," said Mohan Ram,MD, Lattice Bridge. Unconventionally, the company will
start up by engaging itself with smaller partners and then bring the bigger
players to its fold.
Though the company will have some SIs, its immediate focus would be on the
office automation channel. "This is because for SIs, we would be one of the many
product stacks they offer. But for the office automation channel, we will be a
core component of their solutions offering. Besides, selling speech technology
needs a lot of convincing of the end-customers, which SIs will not do for one
figment of their entire solution stack," Ram elucidated.
Mohan ram, MD, Lattice bridge |
Currently, the company is focusing on generating awareness about its products
with as many installations of its products as possible. This, the company hopes,
will help it build a robust clientele and also go to prospective customers with
select success stories. The installations will also help it document return on
investment (RoI) on deployment of its solutions before approaching enterprise
customers and even OEMs. It is in talks with vendors like Matrix, Panasonic,
Siemens, etc to have its voice recognition software embedded with their VoIP and
IPBX products.
On the channel front, the company is working on creating a backend
infrastructure before bringing partners on board.
Lattice Bridge's technology products are available in 10 local Indian
languages. "Most speech recognition software vendors have products only for the
English-speaking generation. But we have realized that in India, the need is to
have local variants for software," explained Ram.
The company is working with IIT Chennai to improvise more on its products and
add more local languages. Besides this, it is working on a concept called
Telesite. "We have realized that only 20 percent of the country's population has
access to the internet or rather use it regularly. But more than
50 percent have access to a telephone," Ram stated.
Therefore, Telesite will act like a telephonic webpage. A company can have a
unique Telesite number assigned to it. The caller will hear a brief about the
company on phone itself. Listeners can also make requests or send an SMS to the
Telesite number as well.
The voice-response industry generated $564.8 million in 2005 and is expected
to reach $1.49 billion by 2012, with the majority of growth coming in 2007 and
2008, according to a recent report by Frost and Sullivan. Around 30 to 40
percent of enterprises have or are considering interactive voice response
applications.