Lattice Bridge to tread the channel path

Lattice Bridge has plans to offer its solutions through the channel after

going direct to its customers for the past five years. However, more than

systems integrators (SIs) it will train its sights on the office automation

integrators for assembling their solutions with VoIP and IPBX systems.

"We are taking a calculated risk in going through the office automation

integrators than SIs, because we also believe that their commitment will be



higher," said Mohan Ram,MD, Lattice Bridge. Unconventionally, the company will
start up by engaging itself with smaller partners and then bring the bigger

players to its fold.

Though the company will have some SIs, its immediate focus would be on the

office automation channel. "This is because for SIs, we would be one of the many

product stacks they offer. But for the office automation channel, we will be a

core component of their solutions offering. Besides, selling speech technology

needs a lot of convincing of the end-customers, which SIs will not do for one

figment of their entire solution stack," Ram elucidated.

Mohan ram, MD, Lattice bridge

Currently, the company is focusing on generating awareness about its products

with as many installations of its products as possible. This, the company hopes,

will help it build a robust clientele and also go to prospective customers with

select success stories. The installations will also help it document return on

investment (RoI) on deployment of its solutions before approaching enterprise

customers and even OEMs. It is in talks with vendors like Matrix, Panasonic,

Siemens, etc to have its voice recognition software embedded with their VoIP and

IPBX products.

On the channel front, the company is working on creating a backend

infrastructure before bringing partners on board.

Lattice Bridge's technology products are available in 10 local Indian

languages. "Most speech recognition software vendors have products only for the

English-speaking generation. But we have realized that in India, the need is to

have local variants for software," explained Ram.

The company is working with IIT Chennai to improvise more on its products and

add more local languages. Besides this, it is working on a concept called

Telesite. "We have realized that only 20 percent of the country's population has

access to the internet or rather use it regularly. But more than



50 percent have access to a telephone," Ram stated.

Therefore, Telesite will act like a telephonic webpage. A company can have a

unique Telesite number assigned to it. The caller will hear a brief about the

company on phone itself. Listeners can also make requests or send an SMS to the

Telesite number as well.

The voice-response industry generated $564.8 million in 2005 and is expected

to reach $1.49 billion by 2012, with the majority of growth coming in 2007 and

2008, according to a recent report by Frost and Sullivan. Around 30 to 40

percent of enterprises have or are considering interactive voice response

applications.