Goodbye to Premise-based Contact Center Solutions Reformulated for the Cloud

With the explosive growth of the cloud contact center industry -- between 2008 and 2012, the cloud market grew by some 224 percent and shows no signs of slowing down – it would be an easy assumption to make that nearly all contact centers are operating in the cloud. While growth is impressive, this isn’t true. According to research from DMG, by the end of 2015, only about 18 percent of contact center seats will be delivered by cloud-based contact center infrastructure providers. This means the industry has strong room to grow.

For this reason, it’s worthwhile to examine some of the trends in the cloud-based contact center solutions industry. In earlier generations, cloud solutions were simply versions of existing premise-based solutions, according to Fonolo blogger Shai.

“The first generation of cloud-based call centers were built by repurposing traditional premise-based software and turning them into a multi-tenant cloud-served solution,” wrote the blogger. “For example, Echopass was built around Genesys, Five9 was built around Avaya (News - Alert). Interactive Intelligence (InIn) actually built its CaaS cloud offering around its own premise-based offering. The next generation of offerings are being built from the ground-up as cloud call centers. Late last year, Aspect (News - Alert) released ZipWire, as result of its collaborate with BrightPattern.”

Going forward, the contact center industry can expect to see more solutions built specifically for the cloud. These solutions will be feature-rich, up-to-date, fast to deploy, omnichannel and free of the top-heaviness that a premise-based solution turned into a cloud solution can have. This trend will also be accelerated by telecommunications carriers who are losing revenue for traditional phone service to over-the-top (OTT) communications and collaborations apps. These companies are hungry for new business revenue, and they see providing business services from the cloud a way to earn that revenue. As a result, it’s likely we’ll see more telecom companies partnering with applications companies in order to rebrand the solutions and offer things like PBX (News - Alert), back-up and contact center solutions to business customers.

This doesn’t mean that no-name applications will take over the market. The traditional contact center industry giants aren’t taking the shift lying down, according to Fonolo blogger Shai.

“Avaya, has taken a different tack announcing a collaboration with Google (News - Alert) to create a cloud-based offering with the somewhat cumbersome name ‘Customer Engagement OnAvaya Powered by Google Cloud Platform’,” wrote the blogger. “It builds on Avaya’s success with their mid-market UC product IPOffice. It’s designed to work with Google Chromebook as the agent desktop, which means low costs and easy set-up. Most recently, [Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert)] released its PureCloud ‘Engage’ solution.”

Contact centers, use to long implementation times for new solutions, not to mention large capital outlays upfront, will be the beneficiaries of this trend. They will have more choices, more options, more scalability and more bang for their buck than they ever could have received with premise-based solutions. 

Edited by Stefania Viscusi