Interactive Intelligence draws on a unique heritage in bringing its business process automation solution to market, reflecting its origins in integrated VOIP telephony and contact centre solutions.

The purchase of document scanning, management and workflow solutions from US company AcroSoft in 2009 followed its recognition that effective business workflow must accommodate an ever-growing range of inputs, whether document, email, voice, fax or instant messaging.

It now offers a “communications-based” process automation product, Interaction Process Automation (IPA) as an alternative to process management suites and "tool-kits" that it claims simply embed communications into applications.

"In researching existing BPA solutions we found customers lacked a good choice between the traditionally costly and complex suites, and the toolkits that can trigger notifications and communications but rely on other applications to perform automation," said Interactive Intelligence founder and CEO, Dr. Donald Brown.

"So we created IPA using our existing communications platform to give customers everything they need for a cost-effective and truly complete solution - from a graphical authoring interface and service-oriented architecture, to monitoring and reporting capabilities."

IPA targets mid-size to large organisations across all industries seeking to automate multi-step, people-centric business processes to increase process efficiency and reduce operational costs

A recent report from industry analysts Telsyte, entitled Communication-Based Business Process Automation – The Australian Perspective, identified improvement in business processes as one of the top 5 business priorities for 2010/2011 in the mid-to-large enterprise segment.

Telsyte Senior Analyst Gary Tsang noted that most deployments of “universal communcations” (US) have primarily focused on email and instant messaging integration with telephony.

“UC has no linkage to and are rarely integrated with business critical applications, such as financial and HR systems,” notes Tsang.

Interactive Intelligence’s solution integrate AcroSoft’s document management and workflow
applications with its IP communications software suite in use at organisations such as Charles Sturt University, Teachers Credit Union, TNT, Diabetes Australia, McDonalds and Massey University (NZ).

In a recent report, industry analysts Frost & Sullivan noted that "Instead of merely embedding communications functions into applications, Interactive Intelligence has opted to use its core communications platform as the basis for automation. In this way, IPA gives customers the ability to automate and track entire multi-step processes - including those that fall outside of communications -- thus providing significant and measurable ROI."