Price Interactive (Reston, VA - 703-620-4700) is already the "home" of everyone's favorite voice-enabled web demo, mapquest.com. They're also old hands in the IVR service bureau business, and SpeechWorks partners. PI is now clearly prospecting for its SpeechPort service among the web's major traditional tenants, while building out its hardware and human-resource infrastructure. L&H's RealSpeak is their text-to-speech engine.
In August, the company bought FusionTec, a Virginia-based e-business consulting firm. The company's strength is in implementing Java-based m-commerce solutions. In September, they cornered us at Internet Telecom Expo to shout about their 25,000-port buildout, to support over 35 million minutes per day. SpeechPort carrier-grade facilities in St. Louis, MS, Fairfax, VA, and (future) Denver, CO, feature Sun Netra/Apache web servers, Netra wireless gateways, Sun E450 Speech Application Servers, and HP Openview-managed NOC. They also are the only hosts I've yet seen to publish a formal fee schedule.
In mid-October, PI was able to take the lid off their agreement with MicroStrategy, provider of Intelligent E-Business software. MicroStrategy has 1,000 customers in all kinds of fields and partnerships with more than 270 systems integrators. The company plans to use PI's SpeechPort platform to add voice browsing to its data warehouse.
PI will expand its VoiceXML support by integrating MicroStrategy's proprietary TML voice browser into the SpeechPort platform. This should allow MicroStrategy and its customers to easily design and deploy new applications in a self-service environment. Underneath the hood is a Java enterprise environment.
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