WHAT THE ANALYSTS SAY…
PRESENTER
By Kaspar Roos
Aspire Leaderboard Market Update for Q1 2024 Aspire’s Leaderboard, our interactive, digital-first CCM-CXM vendor evaluation portal, helps industry professionals keep track of key developments in the space and gain a better understanding of their impact on the wider market. Evaluating vendors in six different market segments, the Aspire Leaderboard provides the most detailed and up-todate assessment of software vendors and service providers in the Customer Communications Management (CCM) and Customer Experience Management (CXM) industries. Below you will find a short update covering the most recent developments within each of these six segments. First, the AnyPrem CCM segment evaluates CCM software vendors that have evolved their legacy flagship software solutions by shifting them to cloud-native and CX-oriented versions. We’ve received particularly positive market feedback about OpenText Exstream’s latest 23.4 Cloud Edition, as well as OpenText’s AI Aviator, which provides a flexible framework for various AI applications within the CCM-CXM domain. We’ve already studied Quadient’s acquisition of Daylight Automation (now called iForms), and we will cover it in more depth when we launch an Interaction eXperience Management (IXM) grid focused on providers in the intelligent interactive customer data capture and 28
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processing space later this year. Meanwhile, SmartComms is expanding its cloud-native batch rendering in order to beef up its hybrid cloud capabilities and has enhanced its migration capabilities by creating a global center of excellence that support various regions with accelerators and AI applications. Messagepoint, with its strong focus on healthcare, has expanded further into the AI space by integrating world-class translation capabilities to meet evolving CMS needs involving mandatory customer communications for primary demographics within the Medicare/Medicaid market. Next, the Vendor-hosted CCM SaaS segment is focused on providers that have launched dedicated Software-as-a-Service solutions. Smart Communications, Quadient, and Messagepoint along with smaller players such as TopDown and Iberdok all introduced incremental product improvements. We’ve also examined MHC’s NorthStar cloud solution, a complete refresh focused on AR/AP within the mid-market US healthcare space. For its part, OpenText has taken a very measured approach to SaaS. Besides integration within SAP SuccessFactors (for HR), it has integrated Exstream SaaS with its Case Management solution, (with others in the pipeline), and made Exstream available to developers as an API-
based SaaS solution on the OpenText Developer Cloud. Our third segment, dedicated to Enterprise Communications Processing (ECP), evaluates CCM vendors serving the downstream post-composition market. Crawford Technologies continues to innovate in this space with a strong focus on AI-based translation and accessibility, as well as auto-tagging for accessibility use cases. We’re witnessing a strong push for accessibility, both in Europe and US, that clearly benefits players like Crawford. Ricoh has made some significant architectural enhancements to its Ricoh Process Director flagship ECP solution, while Sefas continues to build out its Conductor solution to support downstream CXM use cases. Meanwhile, Compart is shifting some of its focus to upstream cloud composition (SaaS) with its DocBridge Impress solution. This brings us to the Communications eXperience Platform (CXP) segment for software vendors and service providers building cloud-native platforms that extend composition with homegrown or third-party CXM capabilities, including data analytics, dashboards, digital delivery, inbound/forms, or even marketing automation, journey orchestration, and conversational messaging solutions. Precisely has completely modernized its CedarCX components on a native AWS stack and constructed a new composition