The cloud contact center industry has been a thing to behold in recent years. Its technologies have provided opportunities for companies of all sizes, from small organizations that were formerly unable to afford expensive premise-based solutions all the way up to large enterprises that wished to adopt a true omnichannel strategy for customer support. The model has found favor with companies that wished to save money by allowing their contact center workers to work from home, and from organizations with geographically distributed human resources that wished to tie multiple locations together into a single customer support entity.

The market is hot…very hot. A recent study by International Data Corporation (IDC (News - Alert)) entitled “Hosted and On-Demand Contact Center Services 2012-2018 Forecast: Customer Experience Driving Contact Center Interactions to the Cloud” projected that U.S. spending for cloud contact center solutions and services will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.5 percent to $1.6 billion in 2018. At this time, the study found, a majority of companies are using or evaluating a hosted or on-demand solution for their contact center. Abroad, the growth potential is enormous. While Asia and Africa and South America lag behind North America and Europe in cloud adoption, the trend is accelerating in those areas, as well.

San Ramon, California-based Five9 (News - Alert) is one of the most recognized names in cloud contact center platforms and currently possesses significant market share. This week, the company filed a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC (News - Alert)) indicating its plans for a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of shares of its common stock. Specifics about the number of shares to be offered and price have not been revealed.

J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Barclays Capital Inc. will lead the offering, with contributions from BofA Merrill Lynch, Pacific Crest Securities, Canaccord Genuity and Needham & Company.  It’s a logical step for 12-year-old Five9, which has reported some impressive sales figures as of late. The company has 1,900 customers worldwide, and supports three billion customer support interactions each year. The company’s product integrates well with prominent customer relationship management (CRM, including Salesforce), analytics, workforce management, performance management solutions, and telephony providers, meaning customers run into no headaches when it comes to interoperability. In 2012, the company was named one of the fastest growing tech companies in North America on Deloitte’s (News - Alert) 2012 Technology Fast 500.

Five9 will be co-sponsoring a Web event tomorrow (Wednesday, March 5th at 1:00 pm EST) entitled, “Cloud Contact Centers for SMBs: What, How and When.” Speakers will include Five9 Director of Product & Solution Marketing Mayur Anadkat (News - Alert) as well as DMG Consulting’s Donna Fluss. For more information or to register, visit TMCnet here.