Spescom prepared for push into EMEA market

Speech recognition vendor to launch EMEA partner programme next month

Speech recognition vendor Spescom is set to launch its first EMEA partner programme next month.

South Africa-based Spescom provides tools to record, manage and process voice traffic. The vendor claimed its technology could be used to ensure the quality of customer interaction, for legal purposes, or in support of general business processes.

The VAR programme will go live on 10 August when the vendor hopes to sign the partners it needs to push its portfolio in Europe.

Albert Selzer, managing director of Spescom UK, said: “We believe our technology is mature enough and ready to go to market. It allows users to verify the identity of a person speaking on the phone.”

Selzer added that Spescom enables firms to improve fraud prevention.

“We will only go to market via the channel, never direct,” he said. “We work with partners to build trust and don’t saturate geographies with too many partners. We have one partner in the UK. We want to grow this, but to no more than five partners.”

Selzer said Spescom will operate a single-tier model because a multi-tier approach is “more impersonal”.

“Our product is designed to make it easy for partners to sell to end-users,” he said. “We are also very responsive and like to work closely with partners.

“We are looking to partner with firms with telecoms experience. We want partners who are looking to add Spescom to their portfolio to leverage their infrastructure offering.”

However, Keith Humphreys, managing consultant at research firm EuroLAN, said: “Speech recognition is a difficult sell. Spescom will need to recruit a high-end partner, perhaps in the mould of Damovo, NextiraOne or Dimension Data.”

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