There is an interesting dichotomy playing out in the contact center market today: the vast differences in growth rates for on-premises call center solutions and cloud-based solutions. While the differences vary by region – uptake of cloud-based solutions has been brisker in North American and Europe than in Asia, for example – there is no part of the world that isn’t seeing this very dual-natured aspect of the call center solutions marketplace.
While the premise-based solution marketplace is still seeing growth – these types of solutions are still embraced by the largest of contact centers, their capital-intensive nature (and high deployment time) is keeping that growth more modest. This is well illustrated by a recent report from analyst group Frost & Sullivan that analyzes the growth in contact center applications in Australia.
The Australian contact center applications market grew 11.3 percent in 2012 from the previous year, according to the new report. But it’s the breakdown of the numbers that is most interesting. Frost & Sullivan anticipates that the premise-based contact center solutions market will see only moderate growth of 6.2 percent CAGR from 2012 to 2019. Most of the growth is centered on solutions that achieve performance optimization, quality management and multimedia applications.
The projections for the cloud solutions are very different. The cloud based contact center market in Australia is expected see a CAGR of 38.9 percent from 2012 to 2019. According to Frost & Sullivan, this is due to a small market base and growing demand from organizations adopting cloud based contact center solutions
"Organizations are increasingly evaluating alternative solutions offering similar capabilities with more flexible deployment and payment models; this is driving demand for hosted and hybrid solutions, where vendors such as Interactive Intelligence have been particularly successful,” said Audrey William, Head of Research, ICT Practice for Frost & Sullivan Australia-New Zealand, in a statement.
In its report, the analyst group noted that hosted contact centers are the preferred option for organizations moving away from the premise-based model but perhaps still concerned about the reliability, security and availability issues of a fully cloud based contact center model. A hosted contact center solution with dedicated infrastructure mitigates most of these concerns, thereby serving as the preferred option for organizations, says Frost & Sullivan.