Last year’s Vendor Contender, PerSay, rocketed itself to the top of a very competitive leaderboard in 2009, impressing analysts and putting up some extraordinary numbers in all categories. The Israel-based voice biometrics provider scored an industry-leading 4.5 in accuracy, company expertise, and tied for the lead in customer satisfaction. Founded in 2000 as a spin-off of Verint Systems, PerSay provides its services—text-independent, text-dependent, and text-prompted engines—to the government, telecommunications, and financial services verticals, supporting some very high- profile customers, like Bell Canada, British Telecom, and Vodafone Turkey. One analyst praised PerSay for its “large breadth of products”—PerSay offers three different voice biometric engines, which gives it an advantage. Additionally, PerSay recently partnered with West Interactive—enabling the company to join some of its competitors in leveraging a hosted deployment model.