Message from the CEO

"In 1994 I left a software company that was about to go public – a company that I had started with my own money – in order to found Interactive Intelligence. I did so because I truly believed there was a revolution coming in business communications and I wanted to be part of it.

The early years were tough. Imagine trying to sell a Windows NT-based ‘unified’ communications system against Lucent, Nortel and the other legacy telecom giants. Back in ‘95, ‘96 and ‘97, people said it would never work and would never sell.

Well, seventeen years later, the world looks a lot different! We’ve sold thousands of systems. Gartner has declared the PBX dead. And the telecom giants like Siemens and Nortel don’t look quite so tall. In fact, the same competitors that derided our system back then have been scrambling in an effort to stitch together multiple products and re-label them as ‘unified’ in an attempt to play catch up.

However, we haven’t looked back. With our continued focus on R&D, rapid revenue growth, and consistent profitability, we’re now not only known as a technology innovator, but as an industry leader with a proven track record. For the second year in a row we’ve been placed in the leaders’ quadrant of Gartner’s global Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure report; for the 10th year in a row we’ve been named among Software Magazine’s global top 500 software and services providers; and for the first time Forbes Magazine has named us among its 100 Best Small Companies in America.

Today, backed by more than 4,000 global customers and 300 value-added resellers around the world, we give even the largest organizations an innovative yet reliable alternative when selecting between start-up vendors offering ‘bleeding-edge’ solutions, and the legacy dinosaurs that have simply put new names on the same old proprietary systems. We’ll continue to raise the bar this year, packing more functionality into our flagship IP contact center software suite, which includes an exciting new speech analytics application; expanding our communications-as-a-service offering; and building on our vertical solutions for insurance and collections.

To all those customers who believed in us during the early years, I want to express my deepest gratitude. And to all those customers we've yet to win, I invite you to share in our vision of a modern, streamlined communications solution instead of the complicated tangle of proprietary devices offered by the rest of the pack."

- - Dr. Donald E. Brown, Founder and CEO, Interactive Intelligence Inc., January 2011