Vocollect Celebrates 170 percent European Growth with Partners

Vocollect, the global leader in voice-directed work solutions, held its second Annual Partner Conference in Paris, France in February and presented its Europe, Middle-East and Africa partners with a series of awards in recognition of the outstanding performance achieved as the company celebrated further strong sales growth throughout Europe in 2004. Vocollect presented six awards including 'Voice Partner of the Year' and 'Highest Growth Partner'. Greg Tanner, managing director of Vocollect Europe presented the awards in the presence of Jack Levan, Vocollect's president and CEO and senior management and sales people from the company's distribution partners.

The two day convention enabled both Vocollect and its partners to reflect on the results achieved in 2004, to discuss the introduction and positioning of new products for 2005 and to gain 'hands-on' training in the company's rapidly expanding range of hardware and software products to facilitate voice-directed work. In addition, Vocollect presented its product roadmap and the opportunities available to increase sales and to expand into new markets. With international attendees from such partner companies as Alfaland, Capto Austria, KFI, Knapp, Microlise, Optiscan AB, PSI, Psion Teklogix, Viivakoodi, Vocognition, VoiteQ and Zetes, Vocollect demonstrated how to maximise the value of voice in various environments and industry sectors.

"In less than three years since we established our EMEA operations, our European partners grew from less than six percent to more than 27 percent of the sales of a much larger, stronger Vocollect," said Jack Levan.

"The conference was important to our ongoing plans to build our indirect channel and adding strength to their sales and support. The two days enabled us to reinforce our relationships with our partners, who are our exclusive international route to market and share new developments and sales strategies for the future. We were also able to recognise and thank our partners' commitment with special awards for a remarkable year of growth for voice in Europe," added Greg Tanner.

The conference follows Vocollect's outstanding recent financial results- the company achieved full year sales of over $81m in 2004 with over $22m coming from EMEA, a 170 percent growth, over previous year and representing over 27 percent of Vocollect's total sales.

"2004 was another great year for Vocollect and our partners - the spread of our technology into new countries and new vertical markets continued apace, proving that voice technology works in any country, with any language and any dialect. The results achieved by our customers are highly attractive, whether they operate in low or high cost economies and with low or high margin products. Voice has become mainstream in Europe, widely recognised as the best technology for order picking, whatever the environment - and with the expansion of our product lines, voice offers an opportunity to bring improvements in productivity, accuracy and safety to other applications both within and outside of the warehouse," added Tanner.

"The conference was really valuable and enabled us to grasp a real understanding of Vocollect's objectives for 2005," commented David Stanhope, CEO of VoiteQ. He went on to say: "We're delighted to have been recognised as 'Voice Partner of the Year' as it demonstrates Vocollect's recognition of its partners' success. The award highlights the importance of the relationship between Vocollect as the manufacturer and developer of the world's leading voice products, and its distribution partners, who deliver fully tailored voice-directed work solutions to their customers around the world."

Following the two day convention, Vocollect also held a one day conference for the leading Warehouse Management System developers in Europe, sharing with them its product roadmap and plans for 2005. "Our relationships with the WMS companies are greatly valued by Vocollect. Although these companies work closely with our voice resellers to deliver voice enabled functionality to their software platforms, we wanted to take the opportunity to share with them our exciting developments and help them determine their best strategy for exploiting the investment that Vocollect continues to make in its technology. Vocollect invested over 18 percent of its sales into research and development in 2004 and will do so again in 2005, to ensure that we stay at the forefront of our market and continue to deliver outstanding value to our customers, distribution partners and other stakeholders," commented Jack LeVan.