Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

DMG Consulting, which sells contact center and real-time analytics research and consulting services, has published the 2008 Hosted Contact Center Infrastructure Market Report, a guide to the market, products and vendors.

 

The firm's research found that there are more than 385,000 hosted contact center seats in use around the world today: "The projected slowdown in the U.S. economy will be a key stimulus fueling the adoption of hosted contact center products, as companies are compelled to reduce capital investments," DMG writes.

 

The market is expected to grow by 25 percent-30 percent in 2009, according to the report. DMG Consulting predicts that by the end of 2011, 30 percent to 35 percent of all new contact center seats will be hosted.

 

"Hosted contact center products enable companies large and small, as well as government agencies and institutions of higher education, to acquire the technology," said Donna Fluss, founder and president of DMG Consulting. "Given the current economic outlook," she said, hosting provides a way for organizations to get a contact center without the need for a large, up-front capital investment or high start-up costs.

 

"Improving customer service and retaining customers should be a key focus for most organizations during tough economic times," she noted.

 

DMG Consulting's 2008 Hosted Contact Center Infrastructure Market Report features decision criteria for hosted contact center products, explains the benefits of these applications, and presents a buyer's guide critiquing the competitive landscape, a vendor satisfaction survey, and company reports.

 

The five vendors covered at a detailed level are: Aspect Software, Cisco Systems, Oracle Corporation, United Carrier Network and West Interactive. Genesys is also addressed.

 

In February Frost & Sullivan released a report finding that the North American contact center applications markets are poised for "significant growth" in the next few years, and growth rates are "expected to peak between 2008 and 2010."

 

"Growth in contact center applications will primarily be driven by two factors: an increasing trend amongst customers to move to IP-based technology and the replacement sales of systems sold around Y2K," noted Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Kunal Kakodkar.

 

As expected, the Tier One contact center products vendors lead the aggregated market share. Frost & Sullivan found that Avaya's "dominant presence" in the ICR market carries forward to the overall numbers and combined with the company's play in outbound dialing and IVR markets, its revenues exceed the total of its next four closest competitors.

 

At the same time, "significant merger activity has resulted in relatively niche participants grabbing significant shares of the market," the report says. NICE Systems' mid-2006 acquisition of IEX gave it a healthy 4.2 percent overall share — all of it in the agent performance optimization space.

 

Oracle's acquisitions of Siebel Systems and PeopleSoft strengthened its play in the North American customer relationship management market, giving it a lion's share of the MM systems.