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ACD Showing Strength in the Cloud

By TMCnet Staff

A recent report from research giant Frost and Sullivan (F&S) has shown that total revenues from hosted/cloud contact center solutions in North America have already surpassed on-premises product revenue in terms of annual spend for this year. That’s good news for those in the cloud contact center space, but there is still work to be done.

“In terms of installed base penetration, on-premises contact center systems still have an edge over hosted solutions, which translates to a huge opportunity for the latter’s market growth,” F&S noted in a statement.

The demand for best-of-breed cloud applications will be particularly strong in the mid- to large-sized enterprise market where companies will look to source new and add-on capabilities as cloud services, while retaining some of their core systems on-premises, F&S said.

According to researchers, the North America Hosted/Cloud Contact Center Report finds that the market earned revenues of $2.17 billion in 2014 and expects it to reach $3.66 billion by 2019. The hosted/cloud model, comprising best-of-breed and full-suite interactive voice response (IVR), automatic call distributor (ACD), chat, outbound, and agent performance optimization (APO) applications, has emerged as the preferred deployment model for contact center applications. While hosted IVR will continue to have the largest revenue share in this market through the forecast period, hosted ACD, hosted chat and hosted APO will have much higher growth rates.

“Small- and mid-sized contact center organizations are showing a marked preference for full-suite cloud contact center solutions to reduce costs and integration complexity as they move more applications to the cloud,” observed Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) Contact Centers Principal Analyst Nancy Jamison. “However, with more than 60 providers offering a range of best-of-breed, suite and point solutions, customers often feel overwhelmed by the profusion of choices.”

The report concluded that owing to the intensifying competition among pure-play cloud providers for mindshare and the challenge mounted by premises vendors, telcos and outsourcers have step up their marketing and sales efforts to remain competitive in this market.