Saturday 18 December 2010

Canadian Voice ASP Acquires Diaphonics Assets; Pledges Aggressive Marketing in 2011 | Voice Biometrics News & Events

The ten year run of Diaphonics (and its successor firm SecureReset) as a leading provider of voice biometrics-based solutions has apparently come to an end, but its software will live on as part of Ivrnet Inc.’s portfolio. The Calgary-based Ivrnet is a hosted or managed services provider with a quarterly run rate of just over $1 million (Canadian) – up from about $600 thousand per quarter last year. Over the years it has developed and deployed a range of communications services, tools and applications, including voice biometric-based password reset.

In this press release, Ivrnet admits that it was able to acquire the software product “at minimal cost” thanks to the “collapse” of Diaphonics in the course of the global economic downturn. The press release also claims that Diaphonics had invested $12 million to develop its products – primarily for password reset – during its 10 years of operation.

Ivrnet has deployed a hosted version of Diaphonics software since 2009 on a limited basis, involving “the use of speaker recognition as a multi-factor authentication gateway and as a voice sample verifier.” The company plans to integrate this voice biometric authentication capability across its entire line of hosted voice services with “aggressive” marketing to start in March 2011.

The folks at Diaphonics, Andy Osborne and Jeremy Bernard, have been stalwarts in the voice biometrics business. They were among the original sponsors of Opus Research’s Voice Biometrics Conference in Washington, DC, in 2007. As a stand-alone company, they put great effort in product development and marketing but, as we are all learning, voice biometrics are better positioned as part of a larger portfolio of multi-factor and multi-modal solutions. We look forward to seeing Ivrnet’s system wide integration of its “authentication gateway” and will watch with interest for its amped up marketing efforts in the coming year.

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