Interactive Intelligence Group Inc. has been awarded the IP Contact Center Market Challenger PilotHouse award from Nemertes Research.

The company, a global provider of unified IP business communications solutions, beat finalists Apsect, Genesys, NEC, ShoreTel and Siemens to the award after receiving the highest overall score based on end-user ratings in the categories of technology, customer service and value.

“This year’s IPCC PilotHouse ratings show a fairly sizable difference in the scores of the Market Leaders and Market Challengers, with one exception: Interactive Intelligence,” said Nemertes vice president and service director, Irwin Lazar. “It was the only Market Challenger to outscore all Market Leaders in overall score.”

According to the report, key to Interactive Intelligence’s victory was its technology score. “Interactive Intelligence’s solution gets the top score for technology,” Lazar said. “Interactive Intelligence benefits from its tightly integrated unified communications offering, its flexible model for delivering integrated on-premises and cloud-based offerings, and its business process automation engine.”

The Nemertes PilotHouse awards for IPCC, now in its third year, recognises IP contact centre vendors that offer solutions such as automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, computer telephony integration, and related applications over an IP-based service.

This year’s ratings were based on more than 1,500 qualified submissions from IT professionals.