VIENNA, 27 February 2002: Sail Labs Technology, the former speech technology division of the Sail Labs group of companies, today announced its independent status as it broke away from its parent company, Sail Labs AG.

The parent company had a minority 20 per cent stake in Sail Labs Technology while the majority is held by private shareholders and venture capitalists. As of February 2002 the parent company’s minority stake will be sold to the other shareholders of Sail Labs Technology.

Sail Labs Technology has been operating independently since July 2001.

The move comes at a point when the parent company and the former speech technology division were moving in different directions as a result of developing their respective core competencies. This strategic shift was made to increase Sail Labs Technology’s focus on its core business of speech technology and applied areas.

In the past few years, the speech technology market has seen more growth than have the markets of the parent company’s areas of specialization: content and translation technology. This has spurred the need for extension of development and marketing activities in the speech technology division. In the span of a year, Sail Labs Technology has built and evolved its own marketing and sales network, further reducing its reliance on the parent company. It has also successfully established partnerships with several global solution providers and is currently involved in projects in Europe, USA and the Asia–Pacific region.

“Speech technology is a fast-emerging market with a wide range of application areas. It is primarily the best-of-breed partnerships we cultivate that allow us to leverage the technologies we create and make end-to-end solutions available to our customers,” says Dr Thomas Netousek, CEO of SAIL LABS Technology. “Our vision is to make speech technology accessible to providers of standard applications, custom solutions, and integrators who have no specialization in speech. We can achieve this goal for vertical markets only through best-of-breed partnerships.”

Sail Labs Technology is now open to strategic partnerships with content and translation technology vendors who have stronger synergies with the Conversational System and the Media Mining System, the two product families of Sail Labs Technology.