The cloud is the future—and the contact center solutions market understands this fact.

There are no less than 150 vendors worldwide that are now offering cloud-based contact center infrastructure solutions, according to DMG Consulting. That’s a lot.

It also makes it perilous for contact centers looking to make the move to cloud-based solutions. Not all of those 150 vendors are offering solutions as full-featured as their on-premise counterparts, and many won’t be around in the next five years as there obviously is a shakeup coming due to the volume of offerings currently in the market.

Contact centers surveyed by DMG Consulting said that they were interested in cloud-based solutions for better return on investment, lower total cost of ownership, and ease of use. But replacing on-premise solutions with worthy cloud alternatives can be a trick with so many offerings.

Contact center managers looking to make the change should pay attention, first and foremost, to how these cloud solutions stack up compared with existing on-premise solutions. Many cloud-based offerings claim to be full-featured suites, but are often only slivers of what on-premise incumbents currently deliver.

Contact centers also should consider reputation, and be very weary of the slick marketing messages of many cloud-based contact center solutions. Dig deeper.

Hybrid solutions also can be a good starting place for moving to the cloud. Many of the top cloud-based contact center infrastructure solutions support integration to on-premise and cloud-based third-party applications. The most common of these integrations is between cloud-based ACDs and on-premise-based private business exchange or a cloud-based CRM applications.

The ability to mix on-premise with cloud solutions is both an important feature and a sign that the cloud provider is serious about the contact center market.

The more mature solutions come with prebuilt integrations to more common third-party applications, and also offer published application programming interfaces to facilitate additional integrations, according to DMG.

While the choice in cloud-based contact center software is highly individual, two things are obvious: The cloud is here to stay in the contact center, and there’s going to be a slimming down of the many offerings currently out there to serve the market.