CallMiner Product Innovation Series: Q4 2024
CallMiner's, Bruce McMahon, shares key product updates from Q4 2024. New AI capabilities, including CallMiner AI Assist, add to the long list of AI ad...
A recent Forrester report, “A Better But Still Subpar Global Tech Market In 2014 and 2015,” predicts that, while not the double-digit growth the industry has seen in decades past, global IT purchases will increase by 6.2% in 2014 and 8.2% in 2015, up from 4.3% in 2013. According to a DestinationCRM article discussing the report findings, the biggest growth in IT purchasing will be in software, specifically cloud computing and analytics solutions.
The report also references so-called “smart process apps,” designed for collaboration in environments with frequent process changes, as a category that could experience growth in the years to come. “The focus is not to eliminate people and automate work but to provide people with software tools to work more effectively,” says Forrester vice president and principal analyst Andrew Bartel in the DestinationCRM article.
IBM’s recent $1 billion investment in the newly formed IBM Watson Group confirms Forrester’s prediction that IT purchasing is on the rise. Top Tech News reports that “IBM [calls[] the move a strategic shift to accelerate a new class of software, services and apps that think, improve by learning, and discover answers and insights to complex questions from massive amounts of big data.”
In combination with the funding is the introduction of three new Watson services delivered to the cloud, including IBM Watson Analytics, which DestinationCRM says offers big data insights based on questions posed in natural language by any business user.
CallMiner’s View
Speech analytics will see continued adoption in the coming years as companies begin to accept it as more of a “must-have” tool and less of a luxury item.
There are two factors that will drive this growth. First, as mentioned above, companies like IBM are investing billions of dollars in analytics programs to improve insights from their data sources. Any company that falls behind on their analytics investments will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Growing efficiencies and tightening margins mean that anybody who is slow to react to a changing business landscape will soon be left behind. Just ask your local Circuit City.
The second factor that will drive growth is the continued spread of speech analytics knowledge, best practices, and use cases. When speech analytics was in its infancy, it was difficult to justify the investment because it was just too risky. B2B buyers don’t often like to stick their necks on the line for an exciting but unproven technology. Now, as speech analytics has established itself as a viable way to drive improved contact center efficiencies and lowered costs, more corporations are willing to take the plunge.
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