North American Contact Center Applications Markets Poised for Greater Growth

PALO ALTO, Calif.--The North American contact center applications markets made considerable progress in 2006, growing by a healthy 6.9 percent. Although inbound contact routing (ICR) is the dominant component of the applications market, the interactive voice response systems (IVR) and multimedia systems (MM) markets are likely to achieve maximum growth in next two-three years.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (http://www.contactcenters.frost.com), North American Contact Center Applications Markets, finds that the markets earned revenues of $2.49 billion in 2006 and estimates this to reach $3.67 billion in 2013.

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“The North American contact center applications are poised for significant growth in the next few years and growth rates expect to peak between 2008 and 2010,” notes Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Kunal Kakodkar. “Growth in contact center applications will primarily be driven by two factors: an increasing trend amongst customers to move to IP-based technology and the replacement sales of systems sold around Y2K.”

As expected, the tier one contact center solutions vendors lead the aggregated market share. Avaya’s dominant presence in the ICR market carries forward to the overall numbers and combined with the company’s play in outbound dialing (OBD) and IVR markets, its revenues exceed the total of its next four closest competitors.

At the same time, significant merger activity has resulted in relatively niche participants grabbing significant shares of the market. NICE Systems’ mid-2006 acquisition of IEX gave it a healthy 4.2 percent overall share – all of it in the agent performance optimization (APO) space. Oracle’s acquisitions of Siebel Systems and PeopleSoft strengthened its play in the North American customer relationship management (CRM) market, giving it a lion’s share of the MM systems.

However, as the large enterprise segment begins to saturate, there may be a marked stagnation in growth. Taking this into consideration, vendors should adapt their marketing strategy to target the small- to mid-sized business (SMBs).

“There will be tremendous potential for growth in the small- to mid-enterprise sector,” says Kakodkar. “The industry may experience a slowdown till the still-nascent SMB strategies of the large enterprise vendors come to fruition.”

Large enterprise vendors should remain agile as they move from targeting the larger deployments to identifying and catering to the needs of the small- to mid-sized customer. As the industry peaks and the large enterprise segment attains saturation, continued sustainable growth is only possible through adaptability.

North American Contact Center Applications Markets is part of the Contact Center Growth Partnership Service program, which also includes research in the following markets: Contact Center Infrastructure, Contact Center Services, and CRM Framework. All research services included in subscriptions provide detailed market opportunities and industry trends that have been evaluated following extensive interviews with market participants. Interviews with the press are available.

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