Strong Growth for Hosted and Cloud Contact Centre Solutions in Australia, says Frost & Sullivan
~ Hosted contact centre revenues to overtake Cloud contact centre revenues by 2016
SYDNEY, July 20, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- The Australian hosted contact centre market is well established, with high levels of market awareness. Most hosted contact centre solutions providers in Australia offer end to end capabilities which make it a highly attractive model for organisations looking to migrate from on-premise capital intensive solutions.
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However, the cloud contact centre market is still at a nascent stage of development. Although hosted contact centres bridge the gap between on-premise and fully cloud based solutions, uptake of the cloud contact centre market is currently hampered by security and privacy concerns and lack of good network connectivity. High speed internet and better bandwidth will be the key success factors for wide-spread adoption of cloud contact centre solutions in Australia.
Frost & Sullivan's new report, Australian Contact Centre Market 2015, cites that the contact centre market grew by over 12% over 2013 to reach in excess of A$260 million in 2014. Meanwhile, the hosted contact centre market will exceed a CAGR of 7% between 2014 and 2021, while the cloud contact centre solutions market will surge ahead with CAGR expected to exceed 35% in that same time frame.
Sandeep Karuppuswamy, Industry Analyst, Australia & New Zealand ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan said, "Although concerns around security and privacy presently hamper mainstream adoption of cloud contact centre solutions in Australia, once these challenges are mitigated, the market will witness a strong uptake of cloud contact centre solutions."
Cloud based contact centres refer to the supply of contact centre functionalities such as voice and applications through an "as a service" model. The solution is delivered over the internet from a multi-tenanted infrastructure owned by a service provider. This model differs from a hosted contact centre through its multi-tenancy, which in turn enables significantly greater scalability and the ability to increase capacity to suit demand. Cloud based contact centres also differ from hosted contact centres in their ability to support virtual agents, wherein agents can access the applications from any internet enabled location. Another major advantage offered by cloud based contact centres is speed of service with respect to deployments, upgrades and addition of capacity. The cost of upgrading to the most recent version of the software or application is included in the service costs.
The greater use of mobile devices coupled with customers using different channels such as email, voice, chat, social media and mobile applications, to interact with an agent whilst preserving context, requires an omni channel experience. "WebRTC offers an omni channel experience through which a customer online chat experience can travel through various mediums and still retain contextual information. Amazon and American Express both support video in their applications within tablets; a service enabled through using WebRTC," added Karuppuswamy.
Self-service via mobile applications is increasingly popular as it reduces customer agent interaction time over the phone significantly. Mobility has also allowed organisations to empower their contact centre agents through leveraging the convenience of portability with BYOD; enabling agents to solve customer queries on the go. By reducing physical end points (telephony), organisations deploying contact centres will benefit from increased savings; thus supporting the move from a CAPEX to OPEX model.
Players in the hosted and cloud contact centre market
Telcos are well positioned in the contact centre market because of their strong vendor partnership and network and data centre capability. Telstra dominates the hosted contact centre market with over 65 percent market share. Interactive intelligence's communications as a service (CAAS) offering has helped it grow its business by over 50 percent since 2013, making it a strong competitor in the hosted contact centre space. Due to their breadth of offering, both companies have successfully secured key customer wins recently. Optus, BT, NEC, Dimension Data, Amcom, Ethan Group and Global Speech Networks are the other notable participants.
Audrey William, Head of ICT Research, Frost & Sullivan Australia & New Zealand said, "Australia's cloud contact centre market is fairly consolidated with only three main players - namely IPscape, LiveOps and NewVoiceMedia collectively accounting for over 95 percent of the market share."
William added, "As increased awareness grows demand for cloud contact centre solutions, on-premise applications vendors will look to partner with cloud service providers. By 2020 the market share of cloud contact centre solutions will increase significantly."
Future developments
The contact centre market in Australia is adopting new technologies which are aimed at enhancing the user experience. WebRTC, big data analytics and mobility are transforming the environment for traditional contact solutions into one comprised of advanced integrated seamless solutions. The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a reality and within two to three years, contact centres will begin to leverage the IoT to offer a highly customised and enhanced breadth of solutions and services and reduce overall costs at the same time.
The contact centre market in Australia is undergoing a transformation whereby the on premise model will be displaced by both the hosted and cloud contact centre models. Many contact centre vendors in the on-premise segment have been witnessing declining revenues in the last two years. The shift towards the hosted and cloud based model is the primary reason behind this. However, from a revenue standpoint, on-premise deployments still continue to dominate the market. In the next three to four years, this will change as adoption and penetration of both hosted and cloud based contact centres increase.
Frost & Sullivan's Australian Contact Centre Market 2015 forms part of the Frost & Sullivan Australia and New Zealand Enterprise Communications 2015 research program. All research services included in this subscription provide detailed market opportunities and industry trends evaluated following extensive interviews with market participants. If you are interested in more information on these studies, please send an e-mail with your contact details to Donna Jeremiah, Corporate Communications, at [email protected].
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SOURCE Frost & Sullivan
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