According to Ovum (News - Alert), moving into 2010, contact center outsourcing providers need to take into account that in-house CRM budgets will remain very tight, says industry observer Avinder Batra. 

This is based, Batra says, on a recent Ovum contact center manager survey finding that 'across North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, only one out of five believed that their budgets would grow, with approximately 80 percent stating that theirs would contract or remain flat.' 

Batra says from the perspective of the contact center outsourcer, 'this means new contract opportunities with firms looking to maintain or improve customer service levels, but that can only work within limited means.' 

There is a marked trend for enterprises to want to use their contact centers for the purposes of developing more revenue opportunities and end-user loyalty.

Recently, Analyst and consulting firm Ovum placed CRM vendor Autonomy as 'the leader in the enterprise information access market,' for 'market position and breadth of functional scope and appropriateness for the enterprise' in a recent report.

The report, titled 'The Future of Search,' notes that 'through the acquisitions in 2007 of the archiving specialist Zantaz, and most recent U.K. records management specialist Meridio,' Autonomy (News - Alert) earned the recognition.

'Information access will become increasingly automated with applications initiating the find/ search/ discover/ retrieval process, and users being unaware of the activity that has been performed,' said Mike Davis, Ovum's senior analyst and author of the report. 'The majority of the employees do not either have the time or often the skills or training to search efficiently and effectively.'