Cloud Call Center Market Rapidly Maturing in Europe

By Erin Harrison, Executive Editor, Cloud Computing

In Europe, the cloud call center market, also known as the contact center as a service market (CCaaS), is growing at a rapid pace, allowing organizations to consolidate technology and operations for multiple countries with a single CCaaS supplier.

IT analyst firm Gartner (News - Alert) recently released itsresearch note on the CCaaS market, identifying four distinct types of CCaaS providers: application specialists, communication service providers, system integrators and infrastructure technology providers.

“IT leaders, planners and buyers can start to consider selective providers’ offerings as alternatives to traditional on-premises-based infrastructure deployments,” stated Gartner’s report, “Cloud Providers of Contact Center Services in Europe Offer New Options for IT Leaders.”

Among the vendors participating in the survey were LiveOps, Siemens, BT, SAP, Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) and Dimension Data. Gartner’s research found that CCaaS suppliers in Europe are “demonstrating impressive service availability targets that IT leaders will struggle to match for a lower TCO.”

Further evidence of this shift to cloud call centers is supported by a December 2012 study conducted by OnePoll, which revealed that 73 percent of U.K. -based contact centers already have cloud-based operations, are actively looking or would like to move their operations to the cloud this year, Call Centre Helper noted in a recent report. In addition, about 25 percent of respondents said they already have cloud operations, while an additional 48 percent said they are actively looking or would like to move to the cloud during 2013.

Based on both studies, it’s clear that perceptions about cloud and cloud communications have shifted dramatically in recent history, pointed out Dave Paulding, regional sales director, U.K., Middle East & Africa, Interactive Intelligence.

“The results demonstrate how perceptions have changed since cloud solutions were first introduced to the industry. There are still some perceived concerns around security but, as the findings show, an increasing number of contact centers are looking to deploy cloud-based models and we are seeing this growth in most industry sectors,” Paulding said in the report. “Interestingly, since the 2010 research findings, there is now a greater demand and uptake for cloud-based contact centers in the financial services sector, closely followed by the retail sector.”

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