Avaya Inc., a leading global provider of business communications software, systems and services, today announced it has been placed by Gartner Inc. in the Leaders quadrant of a new Magic Quadrant report on interactive voice response (IVR) systems and enterprise voice portals.

Gartner is a leading industry research and analysis firm, and their Magic Quadrant reports position vendors in either the leaders, challengers, visionaries or niche players quadrants based on the completeness of their vision and ability to execute. Companies listed in the leader's quadrant are cited for performing well today, having a clear vision of market direction and actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market.

The new Gartner report states that the primary driver for enterprise investment in voice response platforms is the strong business case for telephone self-service applications. These solutions enable customers to perform tasks via the phone that would otherwise require a call center agent. According to Avaya, many IVR platforms integrate speech recognition to bring a higher level of convenience and speed to self-service.

Many companies are benefiting from Avaya's IVR and voice portal solutions, including International Speedway, a leading promoter of motorsport activities, and Allconnect, Inc., the leading provider of household connection and comparison shopping services for the relocation market. International Speedway, for instance, uses Avaya Interactive Response to help optimize staff and increase agent productivity, while providing fans with a way to get fast and easy access to timely racetrack information. Allconnect uses the Avaya IVR to provide customers with an array of self service options and proactive outbound calling capabilities, enabling their customers to connect with Allconnect services in a simple, efficient and timely manner.

Avaya's speech self-service applications portfolio includes:

- Avaya Voice Portal, a next-generation software platform for deploying self-service solutions within a service-oriented architecture and speech-enabling Web services across a highly distributed enterprise.

- Avaya Dialog Designer, a tool that gives businesses a cost-effective way to speed the development of speech self-service applications in both traditional telephony and Web services environments.

- Avaya Interactive Response, a standards-based self-service platform that uses speech and touchtone to automate transactions.

"Self-service technologies based on open standards are helping businesses transform their contact center operations, allowing them to uncover new possibilities that let customers access more information, and use new types of transaction capabilities," said Jim Smith, vice president and general manager, Customer Service Applications division, Avaya. "Avaya is helping to drive this transformation with speech-driven services designed for an intelligent communications environment, leading to better customer experiences and improved business results" - Avaya.