With the New Year underway, many companies in the call center industry are looking to make 2010 a memorable one, especially after dealing with the economic recession in 2009. 

For call center software provider, Five9 Inc., last year proved to be more successful than other years, solidifying the company as a front runner in the telecom space. 

In a recent TMCnet interview, Five9’s Vice President of Product Management, David Van Everen, said that for its customers who experienced hard economic times these past two year, companies are seeking innovation ways to cut costs.

With that being said, migrating to an on-demand call center software platform like those offered by Five9 have become more financially sensible, which lead to a more profitable year for the provider. 

Additionally, Van Everen said the company is seeing enterprise customers shift to a software-as-a-service, or “SaaS (News - Alert),” model, which increases the importance of reliability and uptime on a company like Five9.

“And, we expect growth in the availability and use of APIs to access and manage on-demand call centers, as large enterprises accelerate their adoption of cloud-based technology and weave tighter integrations with their CRM and other enterprise-wide business applications,” Van Everen said. 

Our full exchange is below.

TMCnet: Does Five9 have any predictions for the on-demand call center market, and/or cloud computing for call centers for 2010?

David Van Everen: With more enterprise customers turning to SaaS, reliability and uptime will increase in importance, placing greater emphasis on the resiliency of on-demand call center software providers’ datacenter operations. And, we expect growth in the availability and use of APIs to access and manage on-demand call centers, as large enterprises accelerate their adoption of cloud-based technology and weave tighter integrations with their CRM and other enterprise-wide business applications.

Increasing penetration of consumer mobile computing and smartphones will also drive more advanced self-service voice applications, which will be a priority for companies focused on retaining customers as they transition out of recession.

TMCnet: Without unveiling too many layers, what goals has Five9 set for itself in terms of expansion for 2010? In terms of goals in general?

DVE: Five9 will continue our market-leading development with the largest engineering team in the on-demand call center software industry, building on our previously announced Cloud Computing Platform for Call Centers. Five9 will continue its rapid, reliable delivery of major new software releases with advanced applications to provide our customers with greater operational oversight and insight into their business, enhanced integration capabilities to extend the unique benefits of our cloud computing platform, and tools that enable Five9 clients to deliver higher levels of service to consumers, resulting in higher profitability and further cost savings.

TMCnet: In your opinion, how will the call center industry change over the course of this next year? What can we expect?

DVE: The hard economic times of the past two years prompted many large companies to seek innovative ways to cut costs, including migration to on-demand call center software platforms like Five9. As these large companies gain competitive advantage through the benefits of cloud-based solutions, we expect a mass movement toward on-demand call center software in the enterprise space – indeed, Datamonitor is forecasting that adoption of on-demand call center software will grow by roughly 30% over the next three years.