Cloud services are unquestionably one of the most important advancements of the internet age. Offering modular pay as you go options give companies access to utilities that were unobtainable in appliance form. This is certainly the case for call centers which in their premise bases iteration required businesses to dish out thousands for solutions that could be a nightmare to upgrade and maintain. But hosted call center providers like Five 9 are making the burden of startup as light as a cloud, with full fledged hosted contact center suites in a variety of pay as you go options.

The cloud has become the distribution method of choice for many software and infrastructural necessities in the business environment. As Five9’s VP of Product Management David Van Everen (News - Alert) points out, “Any application that supports a virtualized or remote operation is better-suited for a cloud-based delivery model, and since today virtually every large company operates globally, there really are few applications that aren’t well-suited for the cloud. Salesforce.com (News - Alert) led the way for Sales Automation and CRM, and Five9 is doing the same for call centers, which is arguably a much more challenging application to move to the cloud, because of the need to reliably and securely handle high-volume real-time telephone conversations.”

Five9’s (News - Alert) portfolio offers modular options that can be added as a customer grows or purchased all at once to replace a legacy system. The company offers everything from ACDs to IVRs to call monitoring and CTI (News - Alert) integration.

Traditionally SMB have been the most willing to incorporate new solutions because they have more capital than start-ups and less to lose than enterprises, enterprises are beginning to take notice of the advantages offered by the cloud. The hosted call center space is no exception to this trend.

”Five9 is seeing more and more large enterprises and divisions of Fortune 500 companies moving to cloud-based call center technology. Truly, at this point, companies of all sizes are considering cloud-based call center software,” says Van Everen.

A recent in stat report indicated that spending across all business sizes will increase by 112 per cent between 2010 and 2014 as businesses embrace the cloud model. This is unquestionably due to the fact that investment in hosted solution allows for comparable or superior products at a much lower cost.

Given the quality portfolio and demonstrable success in the hosted space of companies like Five9, there’s no reason to think the trend won’t continue to grow will beyond 2014.  

Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Chris DiMarco