Voxeo Acquires VoiceObjects

ORLANDO, FL AND COLOGNE, GERMANY - Today Voxeo, the world's leading provider of standards-based voice application platforms and hosted services, announced it has acquired VoiceObjects, the world's leading provider of self-service application development and analytics solutions. VoiceObjects is used by hundreds of enterprises and mobile carriers including Adobe, Citibank, Hershey, IKEA, Kellogg, Postbank, SAP, Swisscom, T-Mobile, Vodafone, and Volkswagen to reduce the cost and complexity of self-service application design and delivery. VoiceObjects significantly enhances Voxeo's support for advanced application features including large-scale replication, intelligent call personalization and interaction reporting and analytics.

"Voxeo and VoiceObjects share a history of making it easy for companies to build, deploy and manage voice applications. This approach has made both companies major players in their respective markets and their combined expertise strengthens Voxeo's position in the market," said Daniel Hong, Lead Analyst of Customer Interaction Technologies at Datamonitor.

VoiceObjects uniquely enables the development of phone applications that can be deployed on a wide variety of VoiceXML platforms. This capability is in stark contrast to vendor-specific development solutions offered by Voxeo's competitors. These single-vendor solutions restrict application deployment to a vendor's own VoiceXML platform, denying the freedom of vendor independence and application portability the VoiceXML standard was designed to support. Voxeo will continue to openly and actively support VoiceObjects' application deployment on multiple VoiceXML platforms including Aspect, Avaya, Genesys, Intervoice and Nortel. VoiceObjects will also be available in extremely cost-effective ondemand and on-premise offerings bundled with Voxeo's own Prophecy VoiceXML Platform.

VoiceObjects goes beyond just support of leading VoiceXML platforms by also enabling unified communications via voice, video, text and the web. In combination these features enable anyone to develop a single application that delivers Unified Self-Service™ capabilities via multiple VoiceXML platforms, SMS, USSD, 3G mobile video and mobile-web browsers.

"Voice, video, text and web self-service applications are typically budgeted as separate development projects, each with their own specialized developers and schedules," said Michael Codini, VoiceObjects founder, Managing Director, and CTO. "VoiceObjects Unified Self-Service™ capabilities enable the design and deployment of single applications with multiple modes of access, delivering an exponential reduction in self-service development, integration, testing and administration costs."

The VoiceObjects team will continue to be led by Michael Codini. In addition, VoiceObjects engineering, support, training team members as well as other key employees are joining Voxeo. The combined company will continue to enhance the VoiceObjects platform and will launch several new VoiceObjectsbased products and services in 2009.

The VoiceObjects product suite includes VoiceObjects Analyzer, a real-time analytics environment that provides critical insight into self-service applications. VoiceObjects Analyzer includes over 50 customizable reports that provide valuable information to application developers, system administrators, and business analysts. Analyzer was the only product given the highest possible rating in all four analytics areas in the Opus Research report "Analytics and Reporting for Phone-Based SelfService".

"VoiceObjects Analyzer proved to be best-of-breed in terms of 'openness' and its ability to interface with a broad spectrum of enterprise data repositories and business intelligence resources," explained Dan Miller, Sr. Analyst at Opus Research. "Voxeo's partners and customers are destined to be delighted by the enhanced ability to monitor and refine VoiceXML-based applications to provide the best customer experience and business results."

"The strength of the combined companies is based on our shared values: build great products for customers and provide the best service in the industry," said Beatriz Infante, VoiceObjects President and CEO. "With VoiceObjects, Voxeo now offers the most comprehensive phone and unified communication application development solution on the market, addressing every aspect of self-service solution creation, deployment and management."

"Since 1999 Voxeo's mission has been to make it easy for anyone to create and deploy phone applications," said Jonathan Taylor, Voxeo's President and CEO. "Voxeo is passionate about building the best products, delivering the best customer service, and hiring and acquiring the best team in our industry. With VoiceObjects we found exactly that: VoiceObjects is widely held to be the best phone application server and analytics provider in our industry, backed by excellent customer service and an exceptional team. VoiceObjects' German-based operation also accelerates our growing investment in the European market. We see enormous synergy between the two companies and believe the combination offers a clearly superior solution in our market."

Voxeo is an employee-owned company with twenty consecutive quarters of profitable operations while sustaining an average yearly revenue growth rate exceeding 60%. Voxeo has used its strong positive cash flow to acquire four companies in the last four years. VoiceObjects is the second acquisition Voxeo completed in 2008, following the acquisition of Beijing-based Micromethod in August. Voxeo expects to close additional strategic acquisitions throughout 2009. Voxeo and VoiceObjects are both privately held and terms of the deal were not disclosed.

About VoiceObjects
VoiceObjects is redefining automated phone-based customer service for global 500 enterprises and mobile carriers. By delivering personalized self-service solutions, VoiceObjects enables organizations to enhance each user experience, integrate phone self-service into comprehensive customer service strategies and manage phone self-service applications residing on VoiceXML-based IVR platforms. VoiceObjects is used by leading companies including Adobe, Hershey's, T-Mobile, Vodafone and Volkswagen Financial Services, providing personalized customer service experiences to more than 500 million callers each year. For more information visit www.VoiceObjects.com.

About Voxeo
Voxeo makes voice applications easy to build and deploy. The company's common sense approach isn't rocket science: Offer a great platform. Make it exceptionally easy for people to try, buy and use. Provide amazing support. The approach has made Voxeo a leading choice among developers and the answer for companies who don't subscribe to the mentality that a powerful solution needs to be complicated and expensive. More than 34,000 developers and enterprise customers - including half of the Fortune 100 - use Voxeo's Prophecy Platform and Hosting to deliver innovative IVR, VoIP, outbound notification, unified communications and a new generation of SIP-powered solutions. Anyone can immediately download the Prophecy Platform or sign up to use Voxeo's hosted developer portal for free at www.voxeo.com/free.

Voxeo is an employee-owned company with headquarters in Orlando, Beijing, Cologne and London. The company's Prophecy Platform has been downloaded more than 30,000 times since its launch in 2006 and its standards-based IVR hosting platform is the largest in the world and the only one backed by a 100% uptime guarantee. For more information visit www.voxeo.com or call +1 (407) 418-1800 or +44 (0) 20 7887 6085 in the UK and Europe.