Increasing Demand for Cloud Communication Services
Cloud Communication services are among the fastest growing SaaS applications as highlighted below in this Morgan Stanley research from May 2011 (‘Cloud Computing Takes Off – Market Set to Boom as Migration Accelerates’). The numbers below include hosted email, collaboration tools and also Cloud Contact Centre & Cloud PBX applications.
Gartner’s 2011 review of the Unified Communications as a Service market in US included vendors capable of a cloud-based delivery of integrated UC capabilities spanning voice, messaging, conferencing and presence. The report comments that the barriers to moving these cloud-based communication services are lifting as businesses are already using so many SaaS applications. While the Unified Communication deployments had been mainly in the sub 1,000 user space in 2010, there is increasing evidence of up to 3,000 user deployments and larger in 2011. Gartner notes that the cost benefits for Cloud Unified Communications were most compelling for companies with multiple offices and this was leading to demand from verticals such as retail, legal, insurance, real estate and manufacturing. Solgari is well positioned to meet this type of demand with our service offerings, including demand for cross border services.
Opportunity in Cloud Contact Centre, Unified Communications
According to Infonetics research earlier in 2012, there is over 30% growth YoY in the business class Hosted VoIP and Unified Communications space. This includes Cloud Contact Centre & Cloud PBX type applications.
The cloud model has seen unprecedented demand and growth in the Contact Centre market over the past few years. Frost & Sullivan values the Cloud Contact Centre market to be worth $1.4 billion in North America, growing at 11.6% a year. This represents the combined spend across hosted and cloud-based ACD, IVR, outbound contact, chat, quality monitoring, workforce management, and analytics applications. In contrast, the market size for on premise Contact Centre systems is $1.7 billion in North America, and growing at 6.1% a year. In Ireland alone, there are over 30,000 seats in contact centres and communications are two thirds through voice and one third through social media.
Some of the key pointers for Cloud Contact Centre from Frost & Sullivan are as follows:
- Cloud-based solutions are now the preferred Contact Centre model based on greater flexibility, scalability and business agility for Contact Centres, while saving significant costs.
- Revenues from cloud solutions will outgrow on-premise system sales in North America by 2014.
- Ease of integration and management of the hybrid infrastructure should be a key consideration when selecting a vendor.
- The adoption of hosted or cloud solutions is not concentrated in any one or few industry sectors; rather, it is fairly distributed across industry verticals including financial services and healthcare.
- TCO research determined that a 500-seat Contact Centre realizes as high as two times the cost savings compared to a 100-seat centre, over a five-year period, by moving to the cloud.
- As Europe’s economic problems look set to continue for some time, it will drive greater demand for cloud solutions over on-premise systems.