Nuance Appoints New Managing Director and Expands Delivery Capabilities

LONDON and MENLO PARK, Calif. - Nuance appointed Harnish Patel as managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In addition, the company is expanding its sales, marketing and solutions delivery capabilities in the European marketplace.

Patel joins Nuance with over 20 years of experience working in and managing pan-European operations for technology companies. He has held senior sales and management positions in organizations like Sun Microsystems and IBM. At Sun, Patel helped drive the company's $1.2 billion server business in Europe as part of the European Executive Management Team and was responsible for sales, marketing and channel development. At IBM, he was business director of the Intel Server Division for United Kingdom and Ireland. Most recently, he was sales and marketing director at Quadriga, who provisions technology to the hotel sector in the European market, where he grew sales volumes by 75 percent.

In an upcoming report on the European voice business market, industry analyst firm Datamonitor highlights growth - and enterprise uptake - within the voice automation arena.

"More and more enterprises and telecommunications carriers are utilizing voice automation as a high-performance strategy in servicing customers and improving business processes," said Daniel Hong, voice business analyst at Datamonitor. "As a result, the EMEA voice business market is growing as enterprise and telecommunications companies leverage the business benefits of voice automation."

Vodafone Spain is automating its call center inquiries and providing customer access to support services via voice 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Other Nuance customers include BT, Cosmote, Deutsche Telecom and O2.

Financial services organizations across four countries have adopted Nuance speech technology. For example, Lloyds TSB has handled more than 80 million calls and has received a significant ROI on its voice investment. The bank estimates it would now require over 600 additional advisers, plus the call center infrastructure, to accommodate the number of calls being currently handled via this voice driven service.